Run to Win

Last September, Bekele, Tergat, and Gebrselassie wrote an open letter to the International Olympic Committee to try to get cross country reinstated into the Olympic Games. Cross country was originally removed after the 1924 Paris Games when unseasonably hot weather combined with the course going by an industrial chimney spewing noxious fumes led to 23 of 38 runners not finishing the race.

The International Association of Athletics Federations has officially backed the request for a cross country race, stating that it is perfectly reasonable to hold the race on snow for the Winter Olympics, which has the benefit of giving countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia an interest in the Games. Discussions will resume after the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Lamine Diack, the President of the IAAF, said: “The IOC have now written to us to ask our advice and we have told them that we are in favour of it.

“We are prepared to organise cross country in the Winter Olympics.

“It would be a good move for our sport.”

As I stated 6 months ago, I’d love to see cross country included in the games, and holding it the Winter just means that there will be tougher conditions that will be more fun to watch.

The traditional winter sports will probably find a way to block cross country running from the Winter Games, but hopefully there is enough support to overcome that.

(More Info: Inside the Games – Photo Credit: Trail Monster Running)

The IOC has announced that it is going to retest all of the samples collected from the Olympic games in the wake of the positive tests found by the Tour de France for the latest version of EPO, Continuous Erythropoiesis Receptor Activator. CERA is a stamina boosting drug which was not detectable until recently. It increases the number of red blood cells produced by bone marrow, but lasts longer and requires fewer injections than older forms of EPO.

“There will most definitely be some athletes who thought they could escape being caught because they thought the test would not be ready,” said Christiane Ayotte, director of a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory outside Montreal. “We knew it came to the market just before springtime last year and if there were positives in the Tour de France, then we think there will be positives from Beijing.

“Why the technique was not put into place in Beijing, I have no answer to give you,” she said. “But we’re not missing anything. The opportunity to have those samples retested one or two months later is great.”

The President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is planning on making retroactive tests a normal part of the Olympic Games in an effort to discourage doping in the future. The statute of limitations states that an athlete can be found guilty of doping for up to 8 years following an athletic contest.

Christiane Ayotte is positive that there will be more cheats found from the Beijing Games, which is a very cynical point of view that I’m afraid will turn out to be the correct one. There were only 9 positive tests out of 5000, which is less than 0.2% coming positive at the games.

(More Info: NY Times – Photo Credit: Kevork Djansezian)

Here in the United States, everything is in an uproar over the collapse of the financial industries. Personally, I do not worry about it because it lets me buy into the market at a discount. I’m not the only person who isn’t worried, though. IOC president Jacques Rogge has expressed his lack of concern over the financial industry’s problems affecting preparations for future Olympic Games.

“No one has certainties today, but I am not pessimistic for the Olympic Games,” Rogge said.

Funding for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, is secure while authorities in London, site of the 2012 Summer Games, have assured the International Olympic Committee they can overcome the worldwide credit crunch.

The over $3 billion that the IOC spends in each 4-year Olympic cycle are not seen as an expense but as an investment.

The infrastructure improvements that the host cities receive provide benefits for the next 4 to 6 decades, and the Olympic Village is sold after the games to private investors.

(More Info: ESPN – Photo Credit: Dr Andy Miah)

Kenenisa Bekele, Haile Gebrselassie, and Paul Tergat have written an open letter to IOC President Jacques Rogge in an effort to return cross country running to either the Summer or Winter Olympics. Here’s a copy of that letter:

AN OPEN LETTER to the

President of the IOC, Mr. Jacques Rogge and president of the IAAF, Mr. Lamine Diack

We the undersigned global champions and record breakers would like to invite your two highly esteemed federations to consider the re-introduction of cross country running into the Olympic Games programme, either as a summer or a winter sport.

Cross country running is of course the most natural, indeed elemental of all sports. It is a fascinating discipline whose roots are lost in the earliest history of mankind.

In the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, cross country running was so far seen for the last time with the victory of one of the greatest ever Olympians, Finland’s Paavo Nurmi.

The official report at the time noted that a combination of unseasonal hot weather and the effects of the heat of a near-by industrial chimney – yes we had global warming in those days too! – meant that the air temperature on the course was as high as 36 degrees Centigrade (96.8 Fahrenheit). As such, of the 38 starts, 23 failed to finish. The problems of 1924 were certainly unique.

So we humbly and respectfully ask, what is your opinion about returning cross country running to a future Olympic Games, either on the programme of a summer or winter celebration?

We think it would be wonderful to give the worlds best cross country runners the chance to compete in the greatest of all sporting festivals, and are hopeful of a positive response.

Yours in sport,

Haile Gebrselassie, Kenenisa Bekele, Paul Tergat

I would love to see cross country in the Olympics, as well as some event such as a 24 hour or 100 mile trail race. I think that those sorts of sports lend themselves well to not only the Olympic Spirit but also to the Olympic Marketing Machine. Right now, the only foot race off of the track is the marathon, and I would love to see some other races that took to the streets (or preferably, the fields and woods.)

Realistically, I don’t expect to see an ultra- event in the Olympics, but I could see cross country being added in 12 or 16 years or so. I certainly hope to see it, and would make it a point to watch as long as whoever is providing the coverage deigned to allow it.

(More Info: Original Letter [PDF] – Hat Tip: Runner Vision)

This week last year dealt mostly with current news with a the odd random article thrown in.

• Scott started off a discussion on technology and fitness by discussing the sustainable gym. They seem to be getting more popular as time goes on.
• I created a 4^th of July race recap to celebrate the 4561+ people that competed last year.
• In Olympic news, the IOC announced the new Olympic selection process for deciding which sports to include or drop in future games.
• Alberto Salazar was hospitalized after having a heart attack while coaching.
• This week two years ago, I spoke about how one of the best things about the Fourth of July are all of the Fourth of July races you can find in every state. I also did a recap of the 2006 Fourth of July races. I followed that up by describing one of the my favorite runs from preseason in college, the beach run. In running news, Sam Thompson beat out Dean Karnazes as the first person to run 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days.

Up until now, athletes have not been able to update their blogs during the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee was too scared about copyright infringement and the release of sensitive information.

Athletes that did update their websites during the 2004 or 2006 games did so without permission from the IOC.

Beginning with Beijing, athletes will be able to update their sites in a limited capacity. All blog updates will need to adhere to certain standards. For example, blog entries… (Click here to continue reading…)

The IOC has announced new rules about how it will decide which sports will be included in the Olympic Games and which ones will be removed. Previously, the committee had to vote individually for every sport, and a two-thirds majority was necessary to add or remove a sport or game from what was scheduled for competition. Now, there will be between 25 and 26 core sports which would take some special circumstances to remove, and up to 2 or 3 provisional sports which can be added with a simple majority vote.

The sports for any individual Olympic Games are decided 7 years in advance. Both baseball and softball have been removed until at least 2016. No other sports were voted to take their place for the London Olympics in 2012.

The Winter Games will work in a similar fashion, except that there will only be 7 core sports. More details and a video of IOC President Jacques Rogges can be seen at the IOC website.

(Source: International Olympic Committee)

Last Summer, a letter was leaked to the Los Angelos Times that Lance Armstrong had written to the International Olympic Committee. In the letter, Armstrong called for the forced resignation of Dick Pound due to his slanderous public comments and his lack of ethical involvement in athlete affairs as the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. It did not take very long for Dick Pound to respond and insult Lance Armstrong for writing the letter in the first place.

It took a while, but the IOC has decided to officially reprimand Dick Pound for his comments.

In a rebuke considered rare because it involves one of its own members, the International Olympic Committee officially reprimanded Pound for comments that might have damaged the legendary cyclist’s reputation. [...] According to the IOC’s decision, dated Feb. 2, the organization’s ethics commission recommended that Pound had “the obligation to exercise greater prudence consistent with the Olympic spirit when making public pronouncements that may affect the reputation of others.”

This of course did not phase him in the least. If there is one thing that Dick Pound lacks it is tact. In response to his public reprimand, he told the newspapers that this was the IOC’s way of trying to get Lance Armstrong to stop bothering them, since “Lance Armstrong has probably killed a Brazilian rain forest with all the paper he has used to file his complaints [...]”

Whether Lance Armstrong cheated or not, I think that Dick Pound has continually overstepped his authority and shown that he is not impartial and that he does not adhere to any sort of ethical standards in the way that he deals with athletes. A reprimand is a nice start, but I do not think that it really goes far enough and I doubt that it will be very long before the next controversy is publicized between him and somebody who may or may not be doping.

While he may have done a lot for WADA early in his career, I can not imagine that the circus that he keeps around himself and all of the embarassment that he has brought to the position in the last half dozen years is really worthwhile. Lance Armstrong seems happy to at least have gotten the reprimand out of the IOC, and that is likely all that we will see.

(Source: ESPN.com)