Globe Runner blog

Having recently criticised the Saudi authorities for refusing to send women to the Olympic Games, as part of their refusal to countenance equal rights, I am obliged to report that a young Saudi woman competed in the Youth Olympic Games which concluded last Thursday in Singapore.

Dalma Malhas was a bronze medallist in the equestrian events, where her riding cap, natty jacket and jodphurs conveniently satisfied the apparel requirements of the boys back home, who insist on full-body cover, preferably black.

And indeed some of the women’s teams from Islamic countries, in football and field hockey wore something resembling pyjamas, which can’t have been too comfortable in the notoriously hot and humid conditions which prevail in Singapore throughout the year.

Malhas speaks English with an accent that could cut diamonds, one that not even the British Royal Family would affect on a bad day at the Palace. She is obviously from a wealthy family, and looks every inch of what we call in the UK a ‘Hooray Henrietta’. So when she said after her medal award, “I hope this will inspire every young Saudi woman, and young Muslim woman to practise sport,” you couldn’t actually envisage a rush to the barricades.

On the subject of equestrianism, even Princess Anne, former Olympian, member of the IOC and president of the British Equestrian Association has conceded that her sport probably shouldn’t even be in the Olympics. That rare display of democratic principle does not disguise the fact that, although and IOC member for the UK, the Princess Royal is not available for interview. Ever! Which says just as much about the IOC as it does about the Royal Family.

A senior IOC memeber in Singapore let slip that the Saudi authorities had not wanted Dalmas to compete, from which I can only conclude that the IOC pressured them to concede. It is, at least a step in the right direction.

Some sports and some countries took the YOG seriously, others did not. FIFA, the world football body ensured the entry was derisory in global terms, none of the major footballing countries entered a team, Chilean and Turkish women, and Colombian men lining up to face the likes of Iran, Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea, for god’s sake. And the USA only had a handful of decent performers in the two major sports I covered, the swimming and the athletics.

In the former that meant the Chinese dominated the pool, as they did, more or less the whole YOG, winning double the number of medals of any other country. The IOC declined to publish a medals table, emphasising that the accent was on the taking part. The media, of course, obliged with the medal count.

I was hugely impressed by the swimming, both organisation and competition. FINA, the world governing body puts on a wonderfully well-organised programme which goes a long way to making up for the fact that a swim-fest resembles nothing so much as a huge vat of boiling eggs.

But they had the star of the whole YOG for me in Tang Yi of China, a 17 year old whose excellence in the pool was matched only by her sunny demeanour. Tang won six golds, and would have won seven had a colleague not messed up a relay changeover. Yet the moment she heard the announcement of her team’s DQ, she went straight over to congratulate the Aussie team, who had been awarded the gold.

Yet there were those in China who criticised sending Tang to Singapore. Yu Yilei, the sports editor of the English language China Daily felt that Tang would have been better served by the Chinese swimming federation if they had sent her to the far more competitive (senior) Pan-Pac Champs in Irvine, California rather than ensuring a gold rush against fellow youngsters in Singapore. Whatever the merits of the argument, it’s good to see public criticism of officials in what is essentially a government newspaper.

The IOC tried to emphasise the taking part rather than the competition for competitors as young as fourteen. On that score, the programme catered for mixed teams, ie in swimming, there were relays with two men and two women, in archery, there were pairs from different nations, and in athletics, there were continental teams, with 100 metres men’s winner Odane Skeen of Jamaica handing off the baton in the relay to Najee Glass of the USA. They were competing for the Americas.

There were also separate B, C, D, and even E finals for those who didn’t make it to the A final, ie the medal race. It was a way of ensuring that the youngsters got at least two opportunities to compete, rather than mooch around for a week, having been eliminated in the heats of Day One.

But with the accent of development, what was most impressive, at least on the athletics programme was seeing competitors from nations who have rarely, if ever been represented at senior level at the Olympic Games. Including, of course, the young Saudi woman. Keep ‘em coming.

A couple of years ago, my pal Jim O’Brien was chewing the fat with a New York cabbie, and asked where he was born. ‘Ukraine’ came the reply, to which the only response was, of course, ‘Sergei Bubka’! “Everyone knows Bubka,” growled the cabbie.

But there was a time when nobody knew Bubka. Even after he had sprung a massive surprise, in winning the vault as a 19 year old at the inaugural IAAF World Champs in Athletics, in Helsinki 1983.

I interviewed him at Crystal Palace the following year, when he had very little English. He had set a world record that night, at a venue whose regular swirling winds were anathema to the pole vault. The reason that he had been sent to Crystal Palace, along with several colleagues, who also returned world class performances, was to the remind the world, notably the USA, what they would be missing a month or two later, when the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

However, back to Bubka. I probably interviewed him, or sat in on his press conferences dozens of times in the succeeding years while he dominated his event. But I never heard the tale he told me a couple of days ago, here at the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.

Bubka is in sports politics nowadays. He is president of the Ukraine National Olympic Committee (Valery Borzov is his VP), he is Senior VP of the IAAF, and he’s also on the IOC exec.

Since Bubka was little older than some of the contestants here at the YOG, when he won in Helsinki, we thought it would be a good idea to get him on local TV here in Singapore, to talk about that Helsinki experience.

I began by saying none of us in the media knew who he was in Helsinki, and asked whether he expected to win any sort of medal in 1983.

“Nobody knew who I was, not even my team colleagues. My coach had told me I would arrive at the top when I was 20, but we did it a year early. But I didn’t know anything, I didn’t know about the media, I didn’t know about the protocol. After I won, I just went and got on the bus back to the village. Kozakiewicz (1980 Olympic vault champ, from Poland) saw me, and said, ‘what are you doing here?’ ‘I said, why where should I be?’ ‘At the press conference,’ he said.

“Two hours later, Konstantin Volkov (a Russian, then Soviet) who had won silver came to find me, and he was really pissed (off). First, I had won the gold medal, second, he had spent an hour with journalists asking him questions about me. He said, ‘And I know nothing about you, I don’t know where you come from, I don’t know how old you are, I don’t even know who you are. In fact, who are you?’

Well, we certainly found out over the succeeding years, as Bubka racked up 35 world records, won six world titles in a row, and somehow contrived to win only one Olympic gold, in Seoul 1988.

When I spoke to Yelena Isinbayeva earlier in the week - she too is here, as an Olympic ambassador - she’s said that by the time she retires, around 2014, she wants to put the world record so far out there, “it will last forever”.

That’s not going to happen, of course, and anyway, it was said tongue-in-cheek. But it’s happening with Bubka’s 6.14 metres. That is now 16 years old, and his indoor record, at one centimetre higher, is 17 years old.

Another measure of those marks is that, among current vaulters, Renaud Lavillenie of France is closest, at 6.01 metres. Lavillenie is only 23 years of age, the same age Bubka was, when he cleared 6.01m for the first time. But it was a world record when Bubka did it. And 15 centimetres looks an awful long way up, even for someone of Lavillenie’s obvious talents.

Le Grand Sergei looks as if he is going to be top of that particular heap for a very long time to come.

Speaking of long-standing records, I’ll end on a different Franco/Ukrainian note. There was a beautiful moment on the final night of athletics here at the YOG. The evening had been marred by torrential rain, which particularly affected the hammer throwers.

She only got one valid throw out, but 59.08 metres was enough for Alexia Sedykh to win gold in the young women’s event. You could say that this gold was utterly predictable, because dad, as you’ve guessed is Yuriy Sedykh, who won Olympic hammer gold in 1976 and 1980, and mom is Natalya Lisovskaya, who won shot put gold in Seoul 1988.

They both still hold their respective world records, incidentally, Yuriy with 86.74 metres, at the European Champs in Stuttgart 1986; and mom with 22.63 metres, in Moscow 1987.

The Sedykh family lives in Paris nowadays, and Alexia competes for France. She was awarded her gold medal by Nawal El Moutawakil, who won the Olympic 400 metres hurdles in Los Angeles 1984 (courtesy, one might say, of the East European boycott); but guess who was on hand to give the mascots to the medal winners?

He’s bald at the front nowadays, and the grey hair at the back is tied in a long ponytail, but I doubt anyone is ever going to call him a superannuated hippy, at least not to his face, because he’s still built like a Mack truck. It was, of course, dad. He duly handed over the mascot to Alexia, then reached up and clasped the gold medallist in a long, enormous bear-hug.

It brought tears to the eyes of even the most cynical commentator. And I should know.

The Opening Ceremony for the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore takes place tonight, and competition begins tomorrow, Sunday August 15, with the athletics programme bursting out of the blocks on Tuesday.

There was a big debate leading up to these Games on whether to award medals (which they will) or publish records and medal lists (which they won’t); since the accent, say the organisers is more on the taking part than the winning. Yes, well, tell that to the kids.

I’m all for youngsters getting out from behind the computer and going for a jog round the local park, or even shedding a few kilos on the treadmill, if that’s their idea of having a good work-out. But if their parents are anything to go by, fun-running, at least in Europe seems to have gone hand in glove with a disastrous decline in performance levels in middle and long distance running in the last two decades.

I’ve addressed this issue several times in the past, most recently last week in my musings on the European Championships, so I won’t bore you with it again. Instead let’s take a look at the youngsters who have ‘taken part’ during the last decade in the IAAF Youth Championships, which have served as a precursor for these Youth Olympic Games, or YOG, as they’ve been designated.

The IAAF has made a winning start in these Games, by producing an excellent Statistics Handbook which has put every other international sports federation here in the shade. I’ve had my spats with statisticians in the past, for being more interested in figures than facts. Indeed, as I’ve been moved to say, any fool can collect statistics, and many do. But my pal Ottavio Castellini and his colleague Felix Capilla have compiled a booklet which makes for intriguing reading.

The first name, for example, as the winner of the Boys’ 100 metres at the inaugural IAAF Youth World Champs in Bydgoszcz, Poland in 1999, is Mark Lewis-Francis (10.40sec), who made a welcome return to something like form when finishing second in the Euro 100 metres in Barcelona a fortnight ago.

MLF has, of course, had his ups and downs in the intervening years, far more down than up in the last five, and is, if anything proof that superb youngsters don’t necessarily make superb seniors. But other winners at that first Youth World Champs in Poland include Yelena Isinbayeva (here as a YOG ambassador), Kamila Skolimowska, Ladji Ducoure, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Jana Pittman (Rawlinson), Krisztian Pars, and Stephen Cherono aka Saif Saaeed Shaheen. All went on to become Olympic and/or world champions, and world record holders. And for those who believe that there is such a thing as being too good too young, Kenenisa Bekele could do no better than second in the 3000m.

Subsequent IAAF World Youth Champs have revealed the talents of, among others, Allyson Felix, Kerron Stewart, Valerie Vili, Dani Samuels, and the irrepressible Usain Bolt, winner of the 200m in 20.40sec in 2003, in Sherbrooke, Canada. Incidentally, the same year, he ran 20.13sec, aged 16.

And there will be those who won, or even took part in 2007 and 2009, who will doubtless soon emerge into the upper pastures of the senior elite. On the other hand, in the six editions so far of the WY Champs, there have been outstanding winners, over whose decline into obscurity or relative anonymity it is perhaps best to draw a discreet veil.

And so to the YOG, where we can be equally sure of spotting future Olympic and world champions. Where the IAAF Stats handbook has really come up trumps is in their lists of leading performers for 2009/10. As one of my international colleagues enthused, where on earth did they find all this, some of these kids are only 15?

Well, one 15 year old we might mention is Hamza Driouch of Qatar, because we already spotted him ourselves, running 1min 47.05sec for 800 metres in the opening Diamond League fixture in Doha in May. Driouch improved to 1.46.85 in Torino a month later, and won the Asia trial for these Games, running the 1000 metres in 2.22.97 on the same track here in Singapore, where the YOG athletics starts on Tuesday.

Since the age limit is 17, Driouch is competing against guys over two years older. And there are equally impressive marks from some of the other competitors expected here in sticky Singapore, current temperature mid-30s centigrade (up to 90F), with high humidity.

The ‘heavy’ events are difficult to compare, due to the different weight of the implements, ditto the lower hurdles. But as with Hamza in the 1000 metres, you can’t argue with Mariya Kuchina of Russia, who has high jumped 1.91 metres, just ahead of Italian Alessia Trost on 1.90 metres. And Luegelin Santos of the Dominican Republic, with 46.19sec in the 400 metres, has several metres to spare on his closest challenger.

As a comparison for expectation, I retain fond memories of the inaugural IAAF World Junior Championships, in Athens 1986, when the enthusiasm of the teenagers (and profound disappointment, even despair when they lost) was an antidote to the blase attitude that many senior performers had adopted on the burgeoning professional circuit at the time. Sure, the kids in Athens had assured a potential future of good earnings, but they still gave the impression they were there because they loved the sport, and wanted to prove they could win, rather than, as had become the case, just making up the numbers on the nascent Grand Prix circuit, content to pocket a few bucks rather than striving to improve, and even try to win occasionally.

The year before Athens, I had the privelege of meeting, and interviewing one of the heroes of my own teenage running years, Herb Elliott. The Aussie had dominated the middle distances in the late fifties, going unbeaten as a senior miler, taking over two seconds off the world record in a legendary race in Dublin in 1958, and setting another world record in winning the Olympic 1500 metres in Rome 1960 by a distance.

I spent perhaps only a half hour in his company, having breakfast with Elliott, but that was more than enough to see the strength of character in the man, which revealed all I needed to know about how and why he had become a champion (to paraphrase the title of a book I treasured, by his eccentric coach, Percy Cerruty).

At the end of our conversation, in tandem with criticising elite athletes who “demean themselves” acting as pacemakers, Elliott bemoaned the philosophy of ’sport for all’ which he felt had invaded Aussie culture, to its detriment. I do not have his actual words to hand, but to paraphrase, he said we (Aussies) should invest in our ten leading sports, and be content to be world class in those. Amen to that.

And for all the sideshows that are going on in tandem with these YOG, that philosophy espoused by one of the all-time greats of track and field athletics is what motivates the youngsters who will go out later in the week to win, and prove they are the best in the world. Because that is what elite sport is all about.

The European Championships, which ended in Barcelona on Sunday evening created a lot of sound and light. And there can be few better cities to spend a week in and out of the stadium. But when the world champs roll round in Korea next year, then the Olympic Games in London 2012, much of the noise and glitter will have been reduced to a faint echo and glimmer.

Because, though many of the winning and subsidiary performances would have stood up well in global competition, others indicate that Europe is now a backwater for many events.

And it is the showcase events where the shortfalls are most marked. It’s running that keeps track and field athletics together. No matter how much the occasional pole vault or high jump or javelin can enthrall, the field events are less accessible than the running events, for the simple reason that in a race, the first across the line is obviously the winner, whereas in most cases we have to wait to be told who or what has won in the field.

It requires a certain degree of sophistication, gymnasia, weights and other equipment, to train adequately for many field events, materiel which is often not readily available in many of the 200+ countries which the IAAF boasts in the ‘athletics family’. So it is little or no surprise that European countries rank highly in the technical events. And the results from Barcelona bear that out. The winners in the shot, hammer and discus, men and women were all world class, and in the men’s javelin, it is sufficient to say that Andreas Thorkildsen is the first man to hold European, world and Olympic crowns to emphasise the Norwegian’s pre-eminence in his event.

The same can be said currently of the two Brits, heptathlete Jessica Ennis and triple jumper Phillips Idowu, whose performances in Catalonia stand up globally, the more so since they both improved on the performances which won them world titles in Berlin last year.

Russian women remain a force in the long sprints and middle distances (400-1500m), and Svetlana Feofanova (in the absence of Yelena Isibayeva) and Renaud Lavillenie bow to few in the pole vault. And Blanka Vlasic faced her best opponents, and beat them all with 2.03m

But, and it’s a big but, outside of the Russian 400m(H)/800m women, and maybe the French pair, Mahieddine Mekissi-Benabbad and Bob Tahri in the ‘chase, nothing in the track events would raise an eyebrow in the US and Caribbean (100-400) and East Africa (800m upwards).

The recognition by US college coaches that there is no substitute for volume base training (getting the miles in) has translated into an upsurge in middle and long distance running across the Atlantic. But even then it is only scratching the surface of an East African monolith, whose hegemony can be summed up by three Kenyan performances at the African Championships in Nairobi (1750m alt), concurrent with events in Barca.

David Rudisha ran 1.42.84 in the 800m, following a 1.41.51 in Europe; Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop led all the way, to win the 1500m in 3.36.19; but what about Wilson Kiprop’s 10,000m in 27.32.91, with Moses Kipsiro (Uganda) and Geoffrey Mutai less than a second behind? At close to 2000 metres altitude, this defies belief.

Abubaker Kaki Khamis of Sudan, who was sensible enough to stay away from Nairobi, may beg to differ re the men’s 800 metres. And, yes, championship races are often run slowly, giving fast finishers a chance to win, but frankly no other athlete in the world could live with these Nairobi performances. Suffice to add Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell and their female colleagues, and Tyson Gay and Carmelita Jeter in the sprints, plus the US men in the high and quarter hurdles, and the European runners begin to look distinctly second rate.

OK, a European Championship is exactly that, and congratulations to those who won medals. But there was little evidence in Barcelona that the diminishing returns in terms of fewer and fewer medals for European athletes in World and Olympic competition is going to be reversed anytime soon.

Felicitations, Christophe Lemaitre, European 100 metres champion. The 20 year old from Aix-Les-Bains, an area of eastern France more likely to produce skiers than sprinters has justified all the promise of the last two years.

He swept away memories of his false-start DQ at the World Champs in Berlin last summer as easily as he swept past his opponents in the last 30 metres in Barcelona on Wednesday evening. Lemaitre was fastest in the heats and semis and, more importantly in the final, where he relegated defending champion Francis Obikwelu, and marginal favourite Dwain Chambers to also-rans.

No disrespect to Chambers, even if he did get busted for drugs a few years back. I’ve always liked him and feel that, similar to Ben Johnson, he was over-used as a scapegoat. But even as a fellow-Brit, a win for the big bad boy would have seemed like a blast from the past.

After all, breaking ten seconds in three successive decades, as Chambers has done, is a great achievement, but it’s time to move on. And Lemaitre is the future, at least for European sprinting.

Granted, neither 10.11sec, his winning time in Barcelona, nor his best of 9.98sec is going to give Usain Bolt, Tyson Gay or Asafa Powell (or a dozen others) any pause for reflection. But given that they are (you may have noticed) black, and Lemaitre is already being hailed as, ‘The First White Man Under Ten Seconds,’ we are going to be treated, again, to a debate which has festered for over a hundred years.

Ever since Jack Johnson pummelled a string of big hicks with glass jaws into the dust of a dozen or more boxing rings a century ago, and a racist mentality gave rise to the concept of the Great White Hope, we have been saddled with a spurious black v white debate, and not just in sport, it’s just that sport is the most easily accessible battle-ground.

I don’t know what he felt about it, but I always thought it was demeaning to refer to Nobuhara Asahara, 10.07sec in 1997 (and Olympic relay bronze in Beijing, aged 35!), as, ‘the Japanese Carl Lewis’. And when a Chinese eventually and inevitably runs sub-ten (there’s got to be a few more like Liu Xiang in a population of 1.3 billions), are we going to get the ‘Fastest Yellow Man on the Planet’?

Closer to home, far more shocking than Chambers’ defeat was the silver medal for Mark Lewis-Francis, the sort of comeback usually associated with temple veils being rent and rocks rolled away from cave entrances. Because if Chambers had become an unlikely hero, doing his time, taking it on the chin, and coming back winning, MLF, even though younger, was yesterday’s man, the champion-who-never-was.

When Lewis-Francis won the world junior 100 metres in 2000, followed that with an early-season victory over 1996 Olympic sprint champ Donovan Bailey the following year, then went sub-ten (thanks to a faulty wind-gauge) at the World Champs in Edmonton 2001, he was hyped right to the top of the Olympic rostrum. Even Bailey was inveigled into nominating MLF as a likely winner in Athens 2004.

Lewis-Francis did win gold in Athens, but it was in anchoring the British quartet to sprint relay gold. Because, apart from a couple of indoor medals (and a minor bust for cannabis), his individual sprint career went into decline in inverse proportion to his weight rise. Since both he and I come from the Black Country, the old industrial centre of the British midlands, he’ll know what I mean if I use local slang, and say he looked less like a world class sprinter than a little tunky pig.

He was only added to the British team for Barcelona as an afterthought. But, drawn next to Chambers in the final, he gave little ground to his colleague’s good start, and gradually eased up to and past Chambers, winning silver by a margin of 0.006sec, since second to fifth place (Chambers) shared the official time of 10.18sec.

So, little surprise that the fastest white dude on the planet becomes European sprint champion, but major surprise that a one-time tunk could barrel down the track to take silver.

Caster Semenya, newly trawling the tracks of Europe, is not mentioned in Richard Mayer’s recent history of South African distance running, Three Men Named Matthews*, having rocketed into world class since the book went to press a year ago.

But she would fit perfectly into the final chapters about the unusual women - Stephanie Gerber, Zola Budd and Elana Meyer - who have emerged in the decades pre and post-majority rule. That you will almost certainly never have heard of Gerber is testament, as Mayer observes, to that thin line which separates those startlingly talented youngsters who don’t make it from those who do - Gerber was one of the former, better than either Budd or Meyer in her early to mid-teens, while those latter two went on to become world record breakers.

But this book is mostly about men; and that you may neither have heard of the three Matthews - Batswadi, Motshwareteu and Temane - would be because their heyday was in the time when South Africa was banned from Olympic and other international sports arenas, because of the minority government’s apartheid policies. Like Sydney Maree and Mark Plaatjes, who escaped to the USA and subsequently world record and world title fame, Motshwareteu did spend time at college in the US in the early to mid-80s - winning the NCAA cross country in 1981, with UTEP - but it was on a return trip later that he had what was probably his best performance, defeating an Arturo Barrios at the height of the Mexican’s powers, in 1988.

But a combination of circumstance, geography and Motshwareteu’s volatile nature meant that, though he had many magnificent performances at home in SA, he never again reached the heights of his victory in the Crescent City Classic 10k, 100m ahead of Barrios, in 27.54.

The early chapters of the book, beginning with the first black champion Titus Mamabolo (still competing at 69, according to a recent email from Mayer), but concentrating on the three principals, also give a fascinating insight of how the running community cast off the shackles of apartheid well before the government managed it. And how one of SA’s best known exports, gold, also helped nurture dozens of black athletes, who worked for the mines, but definitely not in them.

Mayer confesses to have been naïve to imagine that the athletes put in a shift down the shaft before coming for air or, rather, anaerobic training. But it all made for a burgeoning track and road-running circuit, which since majority rule and economic hardship has all but fallen apart. This, the demise of South African distance running is always in the background, and is clearly suggested in the book’s subtitle, Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running, and its Aftermath.

Mayer, a distance runner himself, and coach, is one of the most enduringly vocal critics of his national federation’s incompetence, mostly recently revealed in the farrago surrounding Semenya. But South Africa is not a special case in this regard - talk to any athlete about their national federation, and you will get a catalogue of criticism.

But even to an informed outsider, it does seem extraordinary that a country with all the relative privileges, in social conditions and infrastructure that South Africans can boast - suffice only to have seen the World Cup stadiums - in contrast to, say Kenya and Ethiopia, and with a larger indigenous population living at altitude, they cannot produce scores, if not hundreds more world class runners to rival the likes of David Tsebe, Willie Mtolo, Laurence Peu, Xolile Yawa, Josiah Thugwane, Shadrack Hoff and the irrepressible Hendrick Ramaala.

A few caveats; I wish Mayer had given us as much personal profile of the others who inhabit these pages as he did of his hero Motshwareteu, who suffered an all too frequent South African death, shot for no obvious reason near his house in Soweto one night in 2001. The script and particularly the pictures could have been produced better, and overall it sorely needed a good editor, firstly the trim the litany of races which becomes wearing, secondly to correct some obvious spelling errors. But it is a valuable addition to athletics literature, offering an insight into a world which was largely ignored, due to the intransigeance of its blinkered rulers.

* Three Men Named Matthews, Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running and its Aftermath - available from: www.redpepperbooks.co.za