Part one | part two | part three My highlight of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games Had someone told me four years ago that my highlight of the 2016 Olympics would be a race-walking event, I’d have laughed in their face. For years, race walking was the one athletics discipline I had no interest in. But in recent years I’ve understood the event better and have developed an appreciation for it. The discipline is often the butt of jokes, ...
Part one | part two Super Mario and his taxi of joy I shan’t remember 14 August 2016 as the night that Wayde van Niekerk broke the world 400m record, nor will I remember it as the day that Usain Bolt won his third Olympic 100m title in a row. No, I’ll remember 14 August 2016 as the day I had the best taxi ride of my life. I’d visited the Canadian Olympic House with some colleagues and friends ...
Following on from part one, these next few instalments (I have no idea how many there will be) focus more on the competition itself in Rio, plus a few other experiences away from the competition arena. It’s not a blow-by-blow report of each event, as they have already been covered in depth long ago elsewhere; it’s simply my own personal account of some of the more memorable events. Embed from Getty Images A flying start No one expected ...
In the weeks before heading to Rio, part of me feared that I wouldn’t return from there alive. I knew better than to read too much into the negative headlines ahead of the Games; after all, when had there ever been a string of positive press leading into an Olympics? And I’m usually a pretty optimistic person. But I couldn’t get rid of this nagging feeling that something bad was going to happen in Rio. I needn’t ...
Embed from Getty Images A few months have passed since the 2015 IAAF World Championships in Beijing, but even now I find myself looking back at some of the results and thinking, ‘did that really happen?!’ Of the four World Championships I have attended, it was my favourite one to date. World records, great contests, surprise medallists, it had it all. Just like most major championships, some events very much went to the form book while others did ...
