- Three boys injured, two seriously, after falling tree crushes them in London
- Wind and rain lash the country - and more is coming tomorrow night
- Elton John cuts short concert due to strong winds
- Charity 10km run is cancelled as sand blows across course
By Jane Bunce
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Two nine-year-old boys suffered serious head injuries after a tree fell on them at a cricket ground in south west London, as winds of up to 56mph swept across the country.
A third boy, also aged nine, suffered a leg injury and has been described as 'walking wounded'.
The accidents came as blustery gales and other unseasonable weather swept up the country from the south coast.
Shock: The tree fell on the three boys at at Spencer Cricket Club in Earlsfield, south west London
The boys had been waiting for a turn in the practice nets at Spencer Cricket Ground, Earlsfield, in high winds when the tree fell.
An ambulance helicopter attended, along with three road ambulances and four other duty officer and rapid response cars, after receiving an emergency call around 3.45pm Saturday.
All three boys were taken to nearby St George's Hospital in Tooting.
Unseasonal: Strong winds and rain batter are battering Britain. With only four days until midsummer's day, the weather on this stretch of the Welsh coastline seems more appropriate to October
The boys with head injuries remain in a serious condition, while the third boy is understood to be stable.
Monique Wilkinson, 33, was staging a birthday party for her three-year-old daughter at her home when she heard the tree fall.
Reliving the horror, she said: 'We could see the kids stuck under the tree and there were a lot of people around. It's terrible.
'These kids play on the field every weekend.
'The air ambulance landed in the field across the road from us and there were four or five ambulances in total.
'The emergency services seemed to have everything under control.
'Another tree came down on this road earlier in the day which shows how bad the winds were.'
A spokesman from Wandsworth Borough Council said the boys were among a line of children queuing at the nets, when 'all of a sudden this tree came down on them'.
'It has been pretty windy in town today and you can have a really healthy tree, but if the wind catches in a particular way a healthy tree can be blown over,' Charlie Masson-Smith from Wandsworth Council said.
'It is a terrible accident.'
The strongest winds today were in Southampton, where they reached as high as 56mph.
'That is a strong gust for the time of year,' MeteoGroup senior forecaster Brendan Jones said.
'Across most of southern England and south Wales there have been gusts of 45 to 50mph which is pretty blustery.'
In Blackpool, the inaugural concert by Sir Elton John at a new venue was cut short tonight by strong winds.
Unsafe: Police advised Sir Elton to stop playing due to the high winds
Nearly two hours into his set at the Blackpool Tower Headland outdoor arena, Elton told a disappointed crowd of almost 11,000 that on police advice he had been told to stop playing.
In Bournemouth, a charity 10k run due to take place tomorrow has also been hit after a thick layer of sand was blown off the beach on to the seafront course.
The seafront road was covered with up to a foot of sand, leaving Bournemouth Borough Council with insufficient time to clear it before the Cancer Research UK Race for Life events in the morning.
Cancelled: Cancer Research UK's 10km Race for Life has been scrapped due to the thick layer of sand blown onto the seafront road in Bournemouth, but the 5km is still scheduled
Hazel Bedford, spokeswoman for Cancer Research UK, said: 'The sand drifts mean you cannot see where the road ends and the beach starts in some areas.
KAYAKER DIES IN WALES
A male kayaker has died in 'challenging' river conditions.
Police were called to the River Conwy in Betws-y-Coed in Snowdonia, North Wales, at about 3.30pm yesterday.
The body was recovered from the water near the Fairy Glen Hotel.
A spokesman for North Wales Police said: 'The investigation is still ongoing and the next of kin have yet to be informed.
'Emergency services would like to advise all watersports people visiting the area that the rivers in the vicinity are very full and conditions are challenging.Caution should be exercised
'We don't want to risk twisted ankles or people falling, so for safety's sake, we are going to restrict the course to the 5k that the council is kindly able to clear for us.'
Nearly 5,680 women are due to take part in the Bournemouth events, 700 of them in the 10k.
Emergency services have reported that a number of other trees and power lines have come down today, elsewhere in the country.
In Plymouth, Devon, a tree was uprooted and sent crashing down into a family home by heavy winds around 8am Saturday.
A window was smashed and railings damaged, but miraculously no one was hurt.
Heavy rain fell today in the country's west, along with Wales and Northern Ireland.
Forecaster Brendan Jones said Sunday would be calmer but the bad weather would return by the evening.
'It will be a better day tomorrow, winds will be a lot lighter before going downhill tomorrow night when there is a going to be heavy rain and the chance of some flooding in the south east corner,' Mr Jones said.
'There could be 20-30mm of rain in just a few hours tomorrow night.'
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
London 2012 Olympics: new Games ticket resale scandal is old problem - Daily Telegraph
But the NOCs often hold back significant swathes of tickets for their own use, to sell to sponsors, provide to athletes families or, in some cases, to earn some cash under the table by selling on to others at highly inflated prices.
They are able to do this because the numbers of tickets made available to each national Olympic committee is never made public. In the past some authorised ticket resellers who have the rights to sell tickets in multiple countries have boasted of being able to surreptitiously swap tickets between countries. So countries with a strong interest in one sport can get tickets allocated to another country.
Only last month did Volodymyr Gerashchenko, the 66-year-old general secretary of Ukraine National Olympic Committee, step down after he was secretly filmed by a BBC investigation team offering to sell up to one hundred tickets worth thousands of pounds for events at the Games.
Locog chief executive Paul Deighton has also been strict about the clear lines of demarcation between authorised ticket sellers who are also official hospitality providers. Technically pools of tickets for one particular client group shouldn't be mixed with tickets for a different group. Nor should hotels or extras be added to ticket sales to artificially inflate prices.
But the wheeling and dealing of tickets around the globe occurs under the cloak of commercial confidentiality. Both Locog and the IOC refuse to release details as to how many tickets each national Olympic committee receives.
Nor do they release how many tickets the hospitality providers have purchased. If they did, buyers in each country would have a fairer idea of the ticket process. The method of calculating each country's allocation would also be scrutinised. But as we have seen with the refusal of Locog to even reveal how many tickets have been available at each session to the UK public, transparency and accountability are not high on the list of priorities.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
London 2012: LaShawn Merritt aiming to bury tarnished gold at Olympics - The Guardian
LaShawn Merritt could not have known when he bought penis enhancement pills over the counter from a local convenience store in Bradenton, Florida, that his embarrassment would go global. "It was more energy-wise," the American Olympic 400 metres champion says, suppressing a guilty smile when explaining his purchase of a product that contained the banned substance Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and which led to his suspension for 21 months.
"[There] was a condom and right beside it was [ExtenZe]. It was a 'boom boom', went-home-type deal. It was a poor judgment call from me. If I'd looked on the back and saw that the label [said] DHEA, I definitely wouldn't have taken it. I'd never think in a million years that I could buy something from a 7/11 and test positive for track and field."
Nor be asked to explain why he bought it in the first place. "Embarrassment was an initial reaction for a minute," he said, "but, when I thought about it, I'm pretty sure there's more than a couple of men here who've taken it. But I'm a pro athlete so I just forgot that part. When I was picking it up, I wasn't thinking about anything. It was just 'boom boom', to the house."
And now it's "boom boom" to the Olympics and Merritt is back in the big time. He is the first banned gold medallist to defend his title, a dubious distinction that does not sit well with Dai Greene, who says he will make his displeasure known if they meet in London. "If I'm in the relay team and we reach the final then there's every chance we'll be lining up against Merritt," the Welsh hurdler says. "I'll tell you now, I'll happily go and find him at the start and tell him to his face, 'You're a cheat and you shouldn't be here'."
Merritt is cool about that. "I have read [what Greene said] and I put it down and kept on about my business," he says. "I just looked at it as somebody else's opinion – it was, honestly, just nothing."
Was he interested in replying to Greene? "You know what, not really but, if we line up, we'll go at it like anyone else. If we get together in the four by four, I'm gonna do my job and he's going to do his job and USA are gonna bring the gold home. It is a little motivating but I've always been motivated without saying anything to anyone. This is what I love to do. If I didn't say a word all year I'd still be as confident."
You tend to believe him. Merritt has a quiet aura, one derived from natural talent and an admirable work ethic – although there are plenty of people in his sport who side with Greene. "There may be people here who think the same thing," he said at the US Olympic team media summit in Dallas. "People think what they think, but I have nothing to do with it. I have to continue to do what I do and that's work hard and show up."
He certainly showed up at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon, two weeks ago when he ran 44.91 seconds to beat a field that included the rising Grenadian Kirani James. The teenager, who beat Merritt on his return to international athletics at the world championships in Daegu last year in 44.60, false-started in the Prefontaine race but ran it anyway – and finished just a stride behind Merritt. Merritt also beat his fellow American Jeremy Wariner, the 2004 Olympic champion, as well as the twice Olympic 400m hurdling gold medallist Angelo Taylor and the Jamaican Chris Brown.
Wariner and Merritt will meet in the final US trials, starting on Friday. "He's a threat every time he steps on the track," Merritt says. "You respect your co-workers because you know how hard it is. But we're fighting for the same position."
It would, nonetheless, be a major shock if Merritt does not make it to London – although he wishes there was one other member of his family there to see him run. His older brother, Antwan, died in mysterious circumstances at college 13 years ago, and LaShawn to this day is not satisfied that justice has been done. "He never got the chance to see me run track," he says. "I'm here and able to do something and I have to maximise my potential. He was a musician who wanted to be an architect and he passed away at his first semester at college. He never even got a chance to start his dream.
"He went to Shaw University in North Carolina. Evidently he got into an altercation with a guy on a basketball court and the guy was part of this off-campus fraternity. That same night, the guy's frat brothers ended up coming to his dorm room, which was on the ninth floor, and he ended up out of the window. It was three big guys. He'd just turned 18 and was smaller than what I am now.
"He died a little bit later but the guys shouldn't even have got through security. There was a camera pointing right [at] the window but it wasn't working. Whoever thought that could happen? They were charged [with manslaughter] but there was some law which meant they couldn't prove that they [were responsible for his death]. One got a little bit of time and others got community service, so I don't think justice was served.
"It gave my life perspective. I learned when terrible things like that happen you just have to keep moving forward, because nothing else is going to stop. The more you sit there in your misery, it's not going to help. If I sit here and do nothing, then I'm only hurting myself. So I kept training. That's what I did during the drug stuff. I went back to school. I didn't finish my degree but I'm majoring in business management. I talked to a couple of local schools on how things in life may happen."
When Merritt failed his drugs test, he became a non-athlete. He always thought he would be reinstated but says it was tough to stay focused on a sport that had rejected him. "For two years I didn't get any money. With the help of some friends, I could pay my bills but not much more than that."
And, if his accountant had something to do with looking after his finances, it was his dead brother who provided the underlying motivation to return to athletics. "I think about my brother before every race because he never got the chance to see me run. He saw me play baseball, basketball and football when I was young but never at track. So I'm doing this for the both of us.
"Me and my brother were really close. He was five years older than me, and I was hanging with him and his friends some time. When I was a youngster he would tell all his friends that I was fast and I would race older guys in the street. He would come to all of my sports events and be the big brother, supporting me. He would give me money; he'd say if I hit two home runs, he'd give me 20 dollars, or whatever. He definitely played a big part when I was growing up.
"He was always a hard worker and I can remember him being in the house at high school, writing music for the whole band. He was a guy who had this talent for music. Even before I step on the track, I say a prayer which he's in and it just gives me strength. I know he's watching over me. I kiss my two fingers, I raise them as high as I can and then, after that, it's time to do what I was blessed to do. If he was here he would have loved to see me do it."
If Merritt does not keep his title, if James rediscovers that extra stride to beat him again – he maintains: "I really feel I beat myself in that race" – he might turn to American football as a second sporting career, having flirted with the option during his enforced exile, as a wide receiver. "It's still a possibility," he says. "It was serious in my mind. I was thinking I have to do something and I think I may still try out. I think am I going to regret it if I never tried it."
Americans love their goals and dreams. Merritt's fulfilment of his talent in Beijing four years ago has been tarnished but he is hanging on to it, regardless. And London, he says, will neither prove him guilty nor innocent.
"Gold wouldn't be redemption for me. I continue to train, to work hard, just as I've done ever since I was 18. If I win – when I do win – I won't think about what went on. It will just be a case of all the hard work I've done paying off. I don't feel I've got anything to prove. No pressure. I'll take it round for round. Now I'm here I'm just going to get the job done.
"I feel the drug testing itself was nothing. Something happened, I didn't read a label. To some people, it may be a cloud but, to me, I just made a mistake and I'm moving forward from it. I feel my case was unique."
Drug-taking in sport has long been an art and a science. It is wrong and it is widespread, but those who are good at it often profit. They risk their health and their credibility because they think it is a price worth paying, a delusion that is sadder even than their fall from grace. Merritt's is yet another case of an athlete claiming ignorance as a defence. It is pretty much the default position of anyone careless enough to get caught – and this one had the added piquancy of embarrassment.
"I was laying in bed, my agent told me, 'We got the letter and they're not letting you compete.' At first it was like when the police pull up behind you on the road and your heart just drops … oh, no. My agent thought it was funny … "
True. But how could an athlete be stupid enough to risk universal derision by using a product such as Merritt did in the pursuit of a possibly marginal advantage? Perhaps he is telling the truth, after all.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
i was on a motorbike earlier so i know how bad the wind was, hope the little lads are ok
- matt, hextable, 17/6/2012 04:28
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