Olympic Games
Edward Snowden and Dr Grigory Rodchenkov are whistle-blowers whose revelations were so explosive that they have become political refugees from their homeland, the USA and Russia respectively. Snowden was the internet tech wiz, working for the CIA and NSA (National Security Agency), who became increasingly alarmed at the degree of invasion of citizen privacy […]
Apologies, dear readers, for the unexplained absence; but after the extraordinary success of London 2012, the only reasonable thing to do was to jump a jet immediately, and check out the next summer Olympic location – Rio de Janeiro. I was surprised to arrive at the tiniest international airport imaginable for a city of ten […]
A world record is, by its nature, extraordinary. But there are some performances which go beyond that limit, inspiring awe and even reverence. David Lekuta Rudisha produced such a performance in the London 2012 stadium on Thursday night, winning the Olympic 800 metres gold in a world record time of 1.40.91sec. And the Kenyan led […]
Following one particularly arduous conclusion to an Olympic decathlon – ie big guys running 1500 metres – an Italian colleague turned to me and said, ‘This is heavy gold’. What he meant was that here was a gold medal won, if not ten times over, then with rather more effort and application than it takes […]
When hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators were killed by the police, army and paramilitaries in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the students, who were the principal victims could at least claim that they had a justified, even a noble cause, ie demanding to know why a country mired in poverty, […]