Since several people have congratulated Peter Head for his award of a wild card for the Olympics in Beijing and Dave McGovern has just left a rectifying comment on this story and our subsequent report that Peter came in as 42nd, I take the opportunity to confess that it was a joke, but, as you can see on the images Peter does have a talent for sports ;-). Apparently, Ingus Janevics of Latvia was the real person who came in as 42nd in Beijing.
Dave McGovern maintains an excellent web-site on racewalking: www.racewalking.org and now also a blog. These are the places to go if you are into real racewalking.
It seems you can't ever make a joke without offending someone. I betcha the real 42nder has a sense of humour though.
ReplyDeleteI'll be embarrassingly honest: I had actually believed the initial post!
ReplyDeleteI mean, I'm not involved in sports at all, and I don't watch the olympics either, so I really had no basis for judgment. I had met Peter once, he struck me as a real stand up guy, and apparently he's talented enough to present, it seems to me anyway, between 28 and 30 different papers at SBL every year, often concurrently, so why not olympic walking too? When I read the post I just shook my head and said, jealously, "man, some people get all the talent! I'd be happy if I could be good at just one thing!"
Finding out now it was a joke is quite funny.
Reading how offended Dave McGovern got by it is even funnier!