Ever since Peter O’Connor scaled a flagpole in Athens to call out Olympic unfairness the stage was set for winning athletes to make powerful statements. So why outlaw it now?Some called him the Antelope. Others the King of Spring. But, above all, Peter O’Connor was a revolutionary. These days the exploits of the Irishman have been all but forgotten, yet at the 1906 Olympics in Athens he caused a worldwide stir by staging the first – and quite possibly greatest – podium protest in history.And what a protest it was. O’Connor was incensed enough when he was told he had to represent Great Britain despite being selected by the Gaelic Athletic Association to compete for Ireland. But matters got even...
It was supposed to be a one-off for London 2012 but the team will be back at Tokyo 2020. Some Scotland players are eager to be involved but only the English are really happyIt was an afterthought as England’s campaign ended at the Women’s World Cup this summer, but reaching the last four opened a door widely assumed to have closed for good seven years ago. England cannot play in the Olympic Games but their success in France means Team GB, coached by Phil Neville, will appear in Tokyo. A concept branded unsatisfactory by three of the four constituent parts will trigger further debate as the Games draw closer.The competitive anomaly is highlighted by the fact Scotland were one of...
Dick Pound’s defence of his latest successor as Wada president, Craig Reedie, just doesn’t stand upEncouraging news for the embattled Wada president, Sir Craig Reedie, as the founder Wada president, Dick Pound, rides eye-catchingly to his defence. By way of recap, Russia last week missed the deadline to allow the World Anti‑Doping Agency access to the Moscow laboratory that was at the heart of its massive state-sponsored doping programme. This deadline was itself a bizarre act of faith on Wada’s part, given that Russia has failed to comply with two crucial recommendations of the McLaren report which uncovered the vast scale of their cheating.Anyway, the predictably missed deadline has gone down like the proverbial sandwich with many national anti-doping authorities,...
The IOC’s decision to keep 2012 Olympics samples for 10 years has led to a steady drip of retrospective failed tests that have given the London Games an unwanted recordTen or so years ago the Evening Standard ran the billboard headline “London Fashion Week Cocaine Shock”. Presumably the twist was that there was someone alive surprised to find it was going on, since the revelation seemed just about as startling as the fact they were playing baccarat in Rick’s place. Over Christmas, the International Weightlifting Federation dropped another bombshell when it announced that five Olympics weightlifters have just been provisionally suspended because some “adverse analytical findings” were discovered when the International Olympic Committee recently retested samples provided in 2012.There were...
The International Gymnastics Federation wants to recognise parkour as a new discipline, with a view to Olympic inclusion in 2024. But the parkour community is opposing the FIG’s effortsThe Dame du Lac lives an hour’s ride from Paris, in the suburb of Lisses. She is a 20m tall triangular wall, rutted and pocked with concrete knobs, ledges and gullies. In the late 1980s David Belle and his friends would come here to swing, leap and bound from one of her nooks to the next until they made it all the way to the platform at the top. They were not only playing but training. There was a discipline to it. Because it all grew out of the obstacle course techniques...