Racewalkers running into more strife
Eight more disqualifications in Olympic racewalking today and the second-biggest blister on the toe of athletics was under examination once again. After drugs, there is nothing like walking the walk to invite the trash talk. Or, more precisely, running the walk.
When the men’s 20km walk at the 1993 world championships in Stuttgart finished up like a John Cleese sketch, the message rang loud and clear that racewalking needed to tidy itself up. Too many athletes were, effectively, running. Seven years later, little has changed.
In Stuttgart, five walkers were disqualified in the last 400 metres while the chief judge behaved like a demented traffic warden, circling the stadium waving his red disqualification disc. However, calls for racewalking to lose its championship licence came to nothing.
In both 20km walks here, the men’s eight days ago and the women’s yesterday, the athlete with the gold medal seemingly won was disqualified. Yesterday, in the 50km walk, such an embarrassment was spared as Robert Korzeniowski, from Poland, completed a historic Olympic double, the disqualifications being applied to chasing athletes.
However, it was enough to keep the issue burning as hot as the morning sun, 81 degrees when Korzeniowski entered the Olympic stadium to become the first athlete to do the 20 and 50km double. No other walker had managed it, even at separate Olympics.
Once again, though, Korzeniowski was knocked on to the back foot in his moment of triumph. He had won the shorter race only after Bernado Segura, from Mexico, was disqualified after crossing the line first; since then, Jane Saville, a Sydney girl, was leading the women’s race and was pulled out just as she was about to enter the stadium.
Korzeniowski, an intellectual who speaks five languages and is as comfortable discussing history, politics and economics as he is athletics, is too smart to attempt a defence of walking’s reputation, saying that competitors had to adjust their technique, as he had after disqualification cost him an Olympic silver medal in 1992, and that judging needed to be improved.
"I received one red card at the beginning of the race today, which I expected," Korzeniowski said. “The judge who gave me this warning has given me one in each competition the last ten years for a non-straightened leg. Too many judges interpreting the rules inconsistently is at the heart of the problem.
"I never see a football referee from a big championship refereeing in a local league," Korzeniowski added. “But we see this in racewalking. There were 11 athletes disqualified in the world championships in Seville last year. There was big war between the athletes and judges.”
Aigars Fadejevs is a journalist by trade and is now an Olympic silver-medal winning racewalker in his spare time. After finishing second yesterday, he defended his sport on the grounds of art and principle but shot it down in terms of unity between judges and competitors.
"Racewalking is the most beautiful and natural sport but judging is part of it and one day you can be a champion and another be disqualified," Fadejevs said. “There will always be war.”
Not if Maurizio Damilano, the 1980 Olympic 20km champion, now chairman of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) racewalking committee, can help it.
"We must propose to the IAAF that we create a super panel of judges which remains together for four years from one Olympics to the next and which judges all the major events,” Damilano said. “The first step must be to create a uniformity of judging. We have athletes who finish sometimes and sometimes do not, yet their technique does not change.”
In the women’s race, Elisabetta Perrone, from Italy, who has been walking at world and Olympic level for eight years, and who had never been disqualified, refused initially to leave the course when she was shown a third red disc at 16km, continuing until she almost reached the approach to the stadium.
Shown three discs in less than half a mile, Perrone’s complaint was that she was, effectively, warned three times for the same offence. A motorist, it was argued by use of analogy, would not be convicted three times for the same speeding offence.
Chris Maddocks, Britain’s leading racewalker, expresses annoyance at racewalkers who do not apply themselves technically and who “take liberties tarring me with same brush”. Maddocks, 43, was walking in his fifth Olympics yesterday, a Steve Redgrave without the medals. His best finish is sixteenth and he was last yesterday.
Bringing up the rear by 28 minutes did not stop Maddocks throwing up his arms in celebration as he crossed the line. Five Olympics, no disqualification. If only there were more like him.
David Powell
The Times
