- 35-year-old only took up rowing three months ago
- Sir Steve Redgrave criticises decision to give him wild card entry
By Ian Garland
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A 35-year-old African rower has stolen the hearts of the London 2012 crowd, after battling to a last place finish in the single sculls - just three months after he took up the sport.
The crowd at Eton Dorney roared Niger's Hamadou Djibo Issaka across the finish line, 100 seconds behind the repecharge winner.
His achievement has made him London Games' answer to Eric the Eel, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who made headlines when he finished last in the 100 metres freestyle at the Sydney Games in 2000.
Hamadou Djibo Issaka of Niger has become an early hero of the London 2012 Olympics - this Games' answer to Eric the Eel
Issaka charges across the finish line at Eton Dorney, 100 seconds behind the heat winner - just three months after he took up rowing
Issaka is at the Games courtesy of a wild card from the IOC Tripartite Commission, which allows each National Olympic Committee up to five athletes to participate at a summer games.
Previously a swimmer, he was handpicked by the Niger Swimming Federation, who sent him to Egypt to try rowing.
After finding his feet, he then went for more training at the International Rowing Development Centre in Tunisia for two months.
His achievements in the past 12 weeks have earned him the status of the landlocked Saharan nation's national rowing champion.
The crowd roared as the grinning 35-year-old crossed the line and then slumped, exhausted in his boat
A giant screen tracked Issaka's performance as he tried in vain to catch the other rowers
His early success faded fast on Saturday as he was quickly outclassed by the other rowers in his heat.
But Issaka was thrilled with his performance.
MEET JENNET THE JELLYFISH
First there was Eric the eel — now meet Jennet the Jellyfish, competing in the same event as Britain's Rebecca Adlington.
Jennet Saryyeva of Turkmenistan finished a minute and 18 seconds behind the rest of the competitors in her 400m freestyle heat.
Her time of 5min 40.29sec is two seconds outside her personal best. Eric ‘the eel’ Moussambani shot to fame at the 2000 Games in sydney when he swam the 100m freestyle in 1min 52.72sec — more than twice the time of the faster competitors and even outside the 200m world record.
It was, however, a new personal best and a national record for Equatorial Guinea.
Grinning ear-to-ear as he climbed out of his boat, he told reporters: 'It went well. I passed the finish line, it was great.'
'There were so many people encouraging me.'
'I was happy to finish under their applause. Really, I'm happy for the whole country.'
Not everyone was happy to see Djibo Issaka at the Olympics, however.
Steve Redgrave, a five-time Olympic rowing gold medalist, is a critic of the decision to allow him to row.
He said: 'There are better scullers from different countries who are not allowed to compete because of the different countries you've got.'
But Matt Smith, general secretary of world governing body FISA, insists he was added to the program and didn't take the place of another rower.
And he's proud of the way the crowd took to the underdog, adding: 'We are so proud. It's given us a new country, and a big boost. As far as rowing is concerned it's fantastic. And we are really happy about the response from the spectators.'
Issaka, meanwhile has had the experience of a lifetime.
On Friday, instead of being tucked up in bed before his early-morning heat the next day, he was inside the Olympic Stadium attending the opening ceremony. He had been advised not to but he couldn't resist.
'It was magnificent,' he said. 'I had never seen fireworks before in my life!'
He certainly didn't produce any fireworks in Sunday's race. But it will probably go down as one of the moments of the London Games.
'I'm preparing for the next competition,' he said. 'I'm happy with how things have gone.'
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Character study: Denver's Geoffrey Kent, actor and fight director for theater companies - Denver Post
Geoffrey Kent is sitting in a quiet Boulder restaurant making a face as he recounts a fall he took during the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's production of the ridiculously pleasurable farce "Noises Off."
Don't fret. It was a planned fall... sort of.
"I was really stressed about it," says Kent, actor and fight director for a number of theater productions in town, "I've choreographed that fall a lot. I was stressed because I was expected to do the best one. If I can choreograph them, I should be able to do them." He pauses. "Then I got up there," he adds with a knowing grin.
"I was reminded that falling down the stairs is half improv. You have to feel what's happening and go with it. I don't fall the same way every night. I follow the same path. I go upside down but where my feet go, what I run into..."
Kent makes his character's slo-mo tumble a thing of slapstick beauty. But the role he plays in writer Michael Frayn's play-within-a-play is already side-splitting.
In addition to being a fight director with a national reputation, Kent regularly acts and directs. In September, he'll cross swords in a production of "The Three Musketeers" at The Denver Center Theatre Company, where he is resident fight director. Later, he'll head down to Colorado Springs to direct the 1930s comedy "You Can't Take It With You" at Theatreworks.
"He's just a superlative fight director, " says Kent Thompson, artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company. "He's skilled in many ways. He's very knowledgable, and he's also a very good actor. The two things really help each. I think his skills as an actor really help the fight director."
For a few months this summer, the fair-haired 39-year-old has relocated from his home in Denver to Boulder to be nearer the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. After all, he's fight director for and acts in both "Twelfth Night" and "Noises Off," and he choreographed the combat for "Richard III" and "Treasure Island."
When Nigel Gore's twisted monarch dies pinned to the wall in the final act of "Richard III," that contorted tableau is Kent and director Tina Packer's handiwork. When one of the characters in Ken Ludwig's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's cutlass-clattering adventure (directed by Carolyn Howarth) takes a 14-foot fall from the yardarm in the heat of battle, ditto.
Kent's temporary move from Denver to Boulder could be considered a homecoming — at least in a theatrical sense.
"My mom and I have been coming to this festival since I was in high school," says Kent, who graduated from the University of Northern Colorado. "She brought me to my first play here, my first Shakespeare. It was 1990." The play? "Romeo and Juliet," directed by actor and local legend Tony Church, who died in 2008.
"I was a senior in high school and had never seen Shakespeare performed live. I'd never seen a staged sword fight." Both the play and the combat made an indelible impression.
Years later Kent met the fight director of that production, Dale Girard, now one of his closest friends. When he was introduced to Girard (who went to high school in Erie but now teaches in North Carolina) he had questions. Kent repeats one with a kind of fresh wonder. "Remember when you did that thing where the guy kicked him in the groin and he fell over?"
His fondness for the Bard runs deep. His dog Titus has stayed in Denver but will travel this winter when Kent heads for a stint at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.
Yes, you heard right: Titus. Kent named his wee chihuahua after the vengeful general in Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
GEOFFREY KENT Kent's acting, directing and fancy swordplay can be seen through the summer and fall. At Colorado Shakespeare Festival's "Noises Off," (ends Aug. 5), "Richard III" (ends Thursday), Twelfth Night" (ends Aug. 8) "Treasure Island" (ends Aug. 9 in Boulder. For complete schedule visit coloradoshakes.org. He'll be perfoming in the Denver Center Theatre Company's "The Three Musketeers." (Sept. 21- Oct. 21; denvercenter.org). He'll direct "You Can't Take It With You" at Theatreworks in Colorado Springs (Dec. 6-23 ; theatreworkscs.org
Source: www.denverpost.com
London 2012 Olympics: Lizzie Armitstead's tough choice to compete in road race vindicated - Daily Telegraph
“I have always loved riding both track and road,” says Armitstead, “and to be honest I would love to have tried doing both but the omnium has become such a specific event that the training does not really coincide with what I have done today. Maybe I can do both in Rio [de Janeiro].”
That is not a threat to be taken lightly. Armitstead is one of that select group of riders in the world who could genuinely contemplate winning medals in both and that list would be headed by yesterday’s winner, Marianne Vos herself, who is a former world and Olympics points champion as well as a world road champion and five time runner-up. Remarkably, Vos is also the reigning world cyclo-cross champion, a title she has won on four other occasions.
In many ways Armitstead is Vos Mark II. The Dutch woman is still only 25, despite having a cupboard full of medals, so clashes between the two great all-rounders of women’s cycling can only become more and more frequent.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
London 2012: how the Olympics suckered the Left - Daily Telegraph Blogs
The London Olympics are the most Right-wing major event in Britain’s modern history. Billions of pounds are taken from poor and middle-income taxpayers and service users to build temples to a corporate and sporting elite. Democratic, grassroots sport is stripped of money to fund the most rarefied sport imaginable. The police and the state are turned into the enforcement arm of Coca-Cola. How did this event suddenly become the toast of the Left?
Corporations who make people fat and sick – or, in one case, actually maimed and killed them – are allowed to launder their images; the London Paralympics, in a detail you simply could not make up, are sponsored by Atos, the firm repeatedly accused of bullying disabled people off benefits. Meanwhile, the main sponsors – the people of Britain – are largely excluded from the event they paid for.
Not just the Games itself, but many other parts of their own city, are sealed off from them. Some of them are evicted and their houses destroyed; others find overnight and without warning that their homes are to be converted into military missile sites, so terrorist planes can be made to kill ordinary Londoners instead of Olympic luminaries. Protestors against any of this are arrested and detained on the flimsiest of pretexts. Almost every promise ever made by the organisers – from the budget to the ‘greenest games ever,’ from the number of jobs that will be created to the number of new houses that will be built – turns out to be false.
The Left should be up in arms about the Olympics, as should any democrat. But as it turns out, all it takes is a few nurses dancing round beds, some coloured lights spelling out the words NHS and we all go weak at the knees and collapse into the IOC’s embrace. Worse, actually: any criticism of the opening ceremony was described by one left-wing newspaper today as “extremist!”
My favourite line was from the Guardian columnist Richard Williams who wrote: “Cameron and his gang will surely not dare to continue the dismemberment of the NHS after this.” Hmm. If dismemberment is indeed their intention, are they really going to be stopped by a sound and light show? This isn’t a new dawn for Britain. It’s a night’s entertainment.
I can’t quite decide whether this is a genuine Diana moment – when the public hysteria is real – or whether it is confined largely to the media. I’ve been there myself – I covered the Beijing Olympics and I know how contagious and seductive the cossetted, enclosed media atmosphere can be. That's how you get reality drifts like Williams'. I’ve been out and about today outside the Olympic bubble and most people I’ve been talking to seem to be taking it a lot more calmly than the papers.
I’ve also had disappointingly few hate emails and tweets after my mixed review yesterday of the great event. One person objected to my gentle mockery of Shami Chakrabarti’s participation. I like Shami a lot, but someone who campaigns for human rights should never have allowed herself to be used to polish the image of an event with such a long record of trampling on human rights. The abuses in London, of course, are comparatively small – but only four years ago in Beijing, thousands of people were made homeless and entire areas starved of water for the duration of the Games so that the Olympic areas could look fresh and green.
Whatever the truth about the mood is, it will pass. I attended the Beijing opening ceremony, as it happens. I wrote some of the same sort of faintly overawed copy that we're seeing in this weekend's newspapers. I can’t remember very much about that night now.
Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk
London 2012: Cadel Evans out and Fabian Cancellara a doubt for time trial - The Guardian
The 2011 Tour de France champion, Cadel Evans of Australia, has withdrawn from the Olympic time trial while Switzerland's Fabian Cancellara will have a health check before deciding whether to start Wednesday's event at Hampton Court.
The Australian Olympic Committee said Evans, who finished 79th in the road race, is too tired to compete in Wednesday's race against the clock. Evans struggled with his physical condition earlier this month, failing to defend his Tour de France title.
Cancellara's crash at Richmond's Star and Garter corner in Saturday's road race was a turning point in the race won by Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, and it has left the Swiss with heavy bruising to the right collarbone that he fractured in April.
The Swiss should start as one of the favourites on Wednesday, together with Great Britain's Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, and the defending world champion Tony Martin, but he left the finish of Saturday's race with his arm in a sling having completed the course after piling into the barriers on the sharp right-hander. "Happy [nothing] is broken but the pain will be on! For the time trial nothing is sure yet," he said on Twitter. "Have no words left. The tears are stronger than the pain."
The Swiss broke his collarbone in the Tour of Flanders in early April but had returned to his best for the Tour de France, in which he won the opening prologue time trial and led the race for a week before Wiggins took over. He was unable to match the Londoner in the first long time trial of the race, however, although he showed searing form at the finish of the first road race stage in Seraing, finishing second to Peter Sagan.
On Saturday he had looked to be one of the strongest in the latter stages of the road race, which boded well for the time trial, until his crash. Evans, meanwhile, suffered from an unspecified illness in the final week of the Tour de France and rode the men's road race on Saturday in order to assist the Australian team, finishing 79th.
Wiggins is unbeaten in long time trials – as opposed to briefer prologues – this season, having taken single stages in the Tour of the Algarve, Paris-Nice, the Tour of Romandie, Dauphiné Libéré and two at the Tour de France. He is confident in his chances of adding a fourth gold medal to his tally of two individual pursuit golds and a team pursuit gold, in addition to the bronzes he won in Sydney in the team pursuit and Athens in the madison. That would give him a higher medal tally than any other British Olympian, moving ahead of Sir Steve Redgrave's six.
The Great Britain men's road race team dispersed on Saturday evening, with only Froome and Wiggins remaining in their Surrey hotel. Mark Cavendish has a packed racing schedule over the next few days, with criteriums – appearance races of about 100km in Belgium on Sunday, France on Monday and Holland on Tuesday. He will then line up at the start of the Eneco Tour in the Low Countries next week, with rumours persisting that he may start the Tour of Britain in early September. His priority this year has been to honour the world champion's jersey by wearing it in as many races as possible and that is set to continue for five more weeks.
David Millar packed his personal effects – luggage from the Tour de France, Olympic kit and all – in to a taxi after Saturday's race finished on The Mall and headed straight for his mother's house in west London. He will enjoy a brief holiday with his wife Nicole and their daughter in Somerset before joining Cavendish at the Eneco Tour. He will also race the GP Ouest France in Plouay, Brittany, and is expected to lead the Garmin team in the inaugural world championship time trial on 15 September.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
London 2012 Olympics: Paula Radcliffe withdraws from Games with foot injury - Daily Telegraph
“However, the down side is that it can break your heart and spirit many times over when your body is simply unable to match what your heart and brain want it to do.”
Charles van Commenee, the UK Athletics head coach, said: “This is obviously a disappointing day for Paula and our sport but it was important to her that if she made the start line it would be in the best possible shape. It wasn’t meant to be and she has taken the right decision to withdraw at this stage.
“I think it is important that we don’t look at Paula’s career in Olympic cycles. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest female distance runners of all time and still holds the marathon world record.”
Radcliffe has been dogged by injury and health problems since she returned to competitive racing following the birth of her second child, Raphael, in 2010, forcing her to admit on several occasions that her body was suffering from irreversible wear and tear after two decades of high-mileage pounding.
She has raced just once this year, in the Vienna Half-Marathon in April, where she was hampered by bronchial problems and recorded the slowest time of her career at that distance.
Following her latest setback, a worsening of an osteoarthritis condition that was first diagnosed in 1994, she flew to Munich for treatment at the hands of sports specialist Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, though not even the man known as “Healing Hans” could solve her problems.
Initially unable to run without pain, she continued to work on a cross-trainer in the hope that her injury would settle down, but Sunday’s fitness test confirmed her fears that the London Olympics were out of reach.
“As desperate as I was to be part of the amazing experience of the London Olympics, I don’t want to be there below my best,” she said. “If I can’t be there and give it my best, then I would rather someone else who can do that is able to be there.
“I have been through the mill emotionally and physically the past three weeks, cried more tears than ever, vented more frustration and at the same time calmly tried every direction and avenue available to heal myself.
“Now is the time to rest totally, give my body chance to recover and assess calmly what can be done and where I go from here. In the meantime, I will be supporting the team as strongly as ever.”
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
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