Australian government to apologise to olympian

Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in the black power salute after receiving gold and bronze medals in then 200m event at the Mexico games is an the iconic image. Rather forgotten, hoever, is the silver medalist Australia's Peter Norman.

Smith and Carlos were sent home but remain heroes to this day. Norman who fully supported their action was ostracised when he returned to Australia. Although he had posted qualifying times for the Munich games he was not sent (although he was apparently carrying an injury). He was not invited in ay capacity to the Sydney games.

Earlier this week The Independent reported that the Australian federal parliament expected to apologise for the way he was treated. Norman was not there to hear it; he died of a heart attack in 2006, aged 64, having suffered from depression, ill-health and alcoholism. But his 91-year-old mother, Thelma, and his sister, Elaine Ambler, travelled to Canberra for the occasion.
 
Andrew Leigh, a Labor backbencher who proposed the motion, said: “In the simple act of wearing that badge, Peter Norman … showed us that the action of one person can make a difference. It’s a message that echoes down to us today. Whether refusing to tolerate a racist joke or befriending a new migrant, each of us can – and all of us should – be a Peter Norman in our own lives.”

The black power protest was the subject of a documentary, Salute, made by Norman’s nephew, Matt, who had been shocked to discover how few Australians knew the identity of the third man in the celebrated photograph.

“He is not recognised for the incredible times that he did,” Matt Norman said in 2008, when the film was released. “And he’s not recognised for standing up for something that he thought was right. He was sacrificing glory for a greater cause, and we need people like that.”

The MPs were due to support a motion recognising Norman’s “extraordinary athletic achievements” The motion also acknowledged his bravery in supporting Smith and Carlos, and his role in “furthering racial equality”.

Norman retired from athletics in 1972 after not being selected to go to the Munich games. He continued to run but the onset of gangrene after an achilles tendon injury in 1985 nearly resulted in amputation. After this he descended into alcoholism, depression and  drug dependency.

Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral in 2006.They both also delivered eulogies and carried his coffin.

his time of 20.06 seconds remains the Australian national record to this day.

I did not now about Peter Norman's story until a couple of years ago. It is clear that he was treated in a shitty manor by the Australian authorities. Sometimes long belated apologies can ring rather hollow sometimes they are necessary. It is only a shame that this apology was not given in 2005 or before.

I'll have to check if the motion was carried

Greatest Olympians?

Every time the Olymics come round there will be more than a few subjective lists of the greatest olympians of all time. The lists will inevitably, but rightly include the likes of Jesse Owens, Fanny Blankers-Koen, Nadia Comaneci, Michael Pehlps, Mark Spitz, Steve Redgrave, Paavo Nurmi and so on. Choosing the greatest out of the contenders is pointless. Comparing an athlete, to a rower, to a gymnast or whichever sport  and so on is like comparing apples, oranges and lychees. Personally I would treat the greats as a pantheon rather than try to rank them. All of the above deserve their place in the pantheon without doubt

On criterion which is sometimes overlooked when writers complie their list of greats is longevity. Admittedly some sports are more amenable to longevity than others:  fencing, sailing, shooting and equestrian sports in particular.

That said staying at the top in these events is a major achievement and just two sportsmen have managed to compete at nine olympic games: Austrian sailor Hubert Raudaschl and Canadian show jumper Ian Miller

Raudaschl on an Austrian phonecard

Born in 1942 Hubert Raudaschl competed at the Tokyo, Mexico, Munich, Montreal, Moscow, Los Angeles, Seoul, Bacelona and Atlanta games. He  won silver medals at the Mexico and Moscow games.

Millar at the Beijing Olympics - pic from CBC

Born in 1947, Ian Millar has competed at the Munich, Montreal, Los Angeles, Seoul, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing games. His only medal, a silver, came at Beijing when the Canadian took second place in the show umping event. He is on course for a place on the Canadian team at London, possibly with his son and daughter

Neither sportsman has been showered with Olympic glory but their sheer persistence in the top flight of their respective sports is more than just commendable.

More to follow

Back in March I put up a post about the only woman in the Afghan Olympic Team Now it seems that she will not be competing in Beijing after all.

Mahbooba Ahadgar (or Mehboba Andyar as she was called in earlier news items –spelling varies) was scheduled to run in the 800m and 1,500m. She had no chance of a medal – indeed it was likely she would have finished a minute or more behind the winners. For her to take part in the greatest sporting tournament on earth would be victory enough.

Miss Ahadgar disappeared from the town of Formia, south of Rome, where she had been training with other Olympic Solidarity hopefuls for the previous month. According to Nick Davies, press spokesman for the world athletics governing body IAAF, the group was due to return to a training camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 7 July – but Ms Ahadgar disappeared. "There were all sorts of lurid rumours about her being kidnapped," said Mr Davies. "But now it emerges that she took her passport, stamped with a visa valid for the Schengen countries, and belongings with her. Clearly she's taken a decision."

Ms Ahadgar phoned her family in of Kabul to tell them that she was on her way to claim political asylum in Norway.

Her decision to run presented Miss Ahadgar with huge difficulties. She chose to train in a headscarf and tracksuit to avoid being criticised for immodesty, and timed her runs for the evening when most Kabulis are at home watching their favourite soap opera. But when foreign journalists came calling at the family home to interview her, neighbours phoned the police and reported that she was receiving men as a prostitute. Her father was briefly thrown in jail until the confusion was cleared up.

Her mother, Moha Jan, added: "We are really scared about the security situation in our country and of the people who have negative views about my family. But these problems cannot stop us from supporting our daughter."

There was always a possibility that she would seize the opportunity presented by her Schengen visa to escape from the grinding poverty of Afghanistan for good. To try to dissuade Ms Ahadgar from vanishing, the head of the Afghan Olympic Federation reportedly threatened to throw her family in jail if she did not return to Afghanistan. Now she has called his bluff.

And who can blame her for making this decision? She faced problems no athlete in the West would face in their worst nightmares. While it would have been great to see her do her very best in Beijing, it would not cut much ice with many fellow Afghans.

Jim Halliday - a true Olympian

If there was a poll to find Britain’s greatest Olympian it is pretty certain that Sir Steve Redgrave would win by a country mile. His feat of winning gold medals in five consecutive Olympics (From Los Angeles to Sydney) is bettered only by the six times Olympians Hungarian Fencer Aladar Gerevich (Team sabre champions Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Helsinki, Melbourne and Rome) and German Kayaker Birgit Fischer (Moscow then Seoul to Athens).

But spare a thought for Jim Halliday who won a bronze medal in the weightlifting lightweight division at the 1948 games in London. What makes a bronze medal won 60 years ago in an event where British success is rare? Just three years before Halliday had been a Japanese prisoner of war and had shrunk in weight from 71kg (10 stone 12lb) to 38kg (about 6 stone).

Halliday began lifting at the age of 15 and had won the Lancashire lightweight title in 1936. He was called up into the Army at the start of the Second World War and had fought in the rearguard defending the evacuation at Dunkirk before being evacuated later at Boulogne. His regiment was later sent to Singapore where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in February 1942.

Despite the conditions in Burma, he retained some of his natural strength - when one camp did not make a primitive barbell using tree trunks, none of the inmates nor the Japanese guards could lift it overhead. However, when Halliday was fetched from a neighbouring camp, he succeeded. As a result, the Japanese commandant further cut the rations because he believed the Britons were getting too strong.

After the war, Halliday started weightlifting again simply to recover his former bodyweight. However, competition again attracted him and he took part in the 1946 World Championships and in the 1948 Olympics, where he was third behind the winner, the outstanding Egyptian lifter Ibrahim Shams. Halliday took gold medals and the 1950 and 1954 Empire Games (now known as the Commonwealth games).

Jim Halliday died on June 6, 2007, aged 89. His achievement goes to show that it is not just the champions who are the great Olympians. Recovering from horrendous ill treatment as a POW to medallist is a magnificent feat by anyone’s standards.

Mehboba Andyar - a true Olympian

The Afghan Olympic team has plenty of problems with run-down facilities and a woeful shortage of funds, but only Mehboba Andyar . the sole woman competitor, has had to prepare herself mentally for the biggest challenge of her life while dealing with sinister midnight telephone calls, the open derision of her neighbours and even police harassment.

When she competes against some of the finest runners in the world, with skills honed at the best facilities, Miss Andyar knows that she has little chance of a medal in either the 1,500m or 800m competitions. Just getting to Beijing will be more of an achievement than most athletic stars will ever know, even if she will be noticed on the racetrack mainly for wearing traditional Islamic dress instead of skin-tight Lycra, and for the novelty of being an Afghan woman.

Her interest in athletics began during the Taleban regime when she had to run in the closed yard of her family home so that enforcers from the religious police could not see her. When the family fled to Pakistan she was able to run in a park in Islamabad but she could not afford to join an athletic club. By those standards things are much better these days.

Miss Andyar trains on a cracked, concrete track in the National Stadium during gaps in the dust storms that sweep through the city. The track, bordered by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire to keep out over-enthusiastic fans during matches, circles a patch of dried, yellow grass where boys play football. The stadium has yet to capture the attention of international sports fans but it is known across the world for being the former public execution site of the Taleban. The support of her coach, family and friends has buoyed her considerable inner reserves of determination but Miss Andyar’s wish to run for Afghanistan has meant putting up with a lot in the past few weeks.

She said: “There have been so many phone calls from people saying I shouldn’t be an athlete. There are often strange men hanging around outside my home. Sometimes stones are thrown at the windows at night and we have had threatening letters.” The catcalls and derision from her neighbours when she runs in the potholed streets around her home are so bad that she only runs at night when they are watching television, despite the risk of falling into a pile of rubbish or down an open drain. Top of FormBottom of Form

She believes that one of the mystery callers has Taleban sympathies and a neighbour who reported her to the police is from the anti-Taleban Panjsher valley. “I don’t worry about these threats but if my family didn’t want me to go, I wouldn’t. They are very afraid about all this,” she said.

Her father was arrested on Monday when police raided her house because the Panjsheri neighbour said that she was entertaining strange men — a French journalist and his translator. The police took all three men to the station but Miss Andyar refused to go. They were released and the police apologised after their chief ordered them to, but Miss Andyar wants the neighbour to be arrested.

Miss Andyar will travel to Malaysia soon, where she will train for five months before the Games. Her coach hopes that this will allow her to focus her mind away from the difficult environment of Kabul. “I don’t care what it is like there,” she said. “As long as I can train hard to do my best at Beijing.”

Her fellow Olympians, a sprinter and a tae-kwon-do competitor who has a good chance of winning a first Olympic medal for Afghanistan, are supportive, and so is Shahpoor Amiri, her coach. He said: “For us it is enough that an Afghan girl is going to the Beijing Games. She doesn’t have to get first or second place, she has overcome so many problems and she is already an inspiration.” He admitted that he was not sure if it would become easier for Afghan women to compete in the future. “A lot of educated people admire her. But the ordinary people, some of them really hate her,” he said.

The show ponies of the Premiership and other massively overpaid sports should count their blessings and get a sense of perspective. It doesn’t matter a jot whether Mehboba comes last in her heats or not, the important thing is that she takes part and performs to the best of her ability. I don’t care if that sounds quaintly Corinthian in this day and age but that is what any sport is truly about.