Category — Athletics

Panama’s Olympic bound athletes. It has three so far: Fencer Jesika Jimenez, long jumper Irving Saladino, and hurdler Bayano Kamani.

Saladino is the current world champion in men’s long jump. He won the gold medal during the 2007 World Championship in Osaka, Japan when he registered a jump of 8.57 meters in his last attempt.

Here’s a pretty strong — but we must say not unfounded — statement by British athlete Jason Gardener on the drug scandals that has engulfed athletics in recent years.

“If Maurice Greene is proved to be a cheat then, apart from Kim Collins, every winner of the world and Olympic titles I tried to win from 1999 to 2005 will have been shown to be frauds.

It’s so disappointing. You can’t help thinking what might have been. My childhood dreams have been destroyed by cheats time after time.

As a teenager, I remember the build-up to the 1988 Olympic final between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis in Seoul and Johnson just blew the field away. It was amazing and an inspiration to me.

Then it came out that he had failed a dope test. I can remember him saying that everyone was on drugs and the outcry in the sport. Now when I look back at that 100m final, with all the people with a question-mark beside their names, he was right, wasn’t he?

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Jefferson Perez the race walker and Jefferson Perez the scholar. Jefferson became Ecuador’s first Olympic medalist when he won the gold medal in the 20-km speed walking competition during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Although his gold in Atlanta remains his only Olympic medal to date, Jefferson has bagged a total of three gold medals in the World Championships (2003 Paris, 2005 Helsinki, and 2007 Osaka). Jefferson used to hold the world record in race walking (1:17:21) but his record was broken last year by Russian Vladimir Kanaykin who set a record time of 1:17:16.

Jefferson is currently training in Cuenca, Ecuador and is aiming for another Olympic gold during the Beijing Games which, incidentally, could be his last Olympics.

Says, our champion race walker on retirement: “I will retire whenever I do not like getting up at 7:00 in the morning on weekends to climb at 4,000 meters above sea level, at zero degrees in adverse conditions.”

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This is interesting. Some countries are finding it hard to find someone to represent them in the Olympics but New Zealand must have an abundance of talents as it has rejected two marathoners despite these two clocking “A-standard times”.

But what exactly is “A-standard time”? Well, we don’t know but we might do a future post on it if we find out what it means. Hehe.

Anyways, the Sunday Star Times reports that one of those rejected by Athletics NZ, Liza Hunter-Galvan, has “engaged an American lawyer to fight her case to be in the New Zealand team for Beijing”.

Is this the first time, someone had to file a case to be included in an Olympic team?

Hunter-Galvan isn’t the only one frustrated with Athletics NZ. According to the Star-Times, marathoner Michael Aish, who’s also not picked has “had enough after a decade of frustration with Athletics NZ”.

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So far, two Rwandan athletes qualified for the Beijing Olympics: Dieudonne Disi (10.000m) and Epiphanie Nyirabarame (marathon). According to The New Times, Rwanda is also set to be represented in swimming as well as in the Paralympic Games.

Disi, the most widely known Rwandan athlete, plans to compete in several events (the USA Lilac Blooms race in Washington DC and the Ablaham RSA race in San Juan, Puerto Rico) as part of his preparation for the Games.