IT'S been a tough weekend for Scottish yachtsman Rodney Pattison. On Saturday morning he was not only Britain's most successful Olympic sailor but also Scotland's greatest Olympic competitor. This morning he is neither. The former submariner has been torpedoed fore and aft.
WE applaud the inspirational South African swimmer, Natalie du Toit, who trains 10 miles a day in preparation for the 10 kilometre open water event which makes its Olympic debut in Beijing. She is tipped to be her country's standard-bearer at the opening ceremony on
Friday night.
The day after the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing next week marks the 60th anniversary of Reg Harris's silver medal in the 1000 metres match sprint. The Englishman also won silver in the tandem sprint with Alan Bannister at those 1948 London Olympics. He is immortalised with a statue on the third bend of the Manchester velodrome.
A strange thing
happened 108
years ago this
week. Women
were allowed for the first time to compete in the
modern Olympic Games. They had been excluded from the inaugural Games in 1896. So entrenched was the misogynist movement that there was no female member on the International Olympic Committee until 1981. But the IOC was not in charge of the 1900 Games, and many of the proposed events were scrapped. Only 22 women (and 975 men) from 24 countries competed in Paris, but historians disagree on many aspects.
It will take a minimum of five years for six members of Eritrea's World Cross-country Championship team to gain UK passports and qualify to represent Britain. The process was not always so long. Twenty-four years ago this month,
Zola Budd had a passport processed indecently hastily, within weeks. Months later she raced in the Los Angeles Olympics, infamously but accidentally tripping home heroine Mary Slaney.
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