Long jump champ Rutherford to retire
Latvia to help Sweden with 2026 Winter Oly bid
LONDON, June 13, (Agencies): Britain’s Greg Rutherford who won Olympic long jump gold on ‘Super Saturday’ at the 2012 Olympics in London will retire at the end of the season he announced.
The 31-year-old — who won gold on the same night as fellow Britons Jessica Ennis-Hill and Mo Farah won gold in the heptathlon and the 10,000 metres respectively and followed three other British golds that day — told The Guardian a persistent pain in his ankle had forced his decision.
Rutherford — the first British man to win Olympic long jump gold since Lynn Davies in 1964 — hopes to have one last championship hurrah in winning a third European crown in Berlin in August before drawing the curtain on his stellar 13-year career.
“As an athlete you often have pain, whether it’s training niggles or serious injuries, but with my ankle it is like having a dull toothache all the time,” he said. “I just don’t want to be in pain every single day of my life, which is how things currently are.
“At times I am in so much pain I can’t even sit on the floor and play with my two kids.”
Latvia’s government on Tuesday adopted a resolution allowing Riga to help Stockholm in its bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics, namely by giving the Swedish Olympic Committee the right to use the Baltic state’s artificial ice track.
Sweden currently has no ice track of its own for bobsleigh, skeleton and luge competitions, while the facility in the central Latvian town of Sigulda has hosted European and World Championships for luge, as well as World Cup and Europa Cup competitions for bobsleigh and skeleton.
The track was built in 1986 and is just 50 kms (31 miles) from the capital Riga which has ferry links to Stockholm.
The Latvian and Swedish Olympic Committees, Sigulda municipality and the state-owned track operator company first signed a memorandum of cooperation in December 2017.
The Latvian government gave it a formal seal of approval with Tuesday’s resolution.
The cooperation between Sweden and Latvia is made possible by the International Olympic Committee’s Agenda-2020 that was drawn up as a template to avoid excessive overspending in the wake of the wasteful 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Britain’s anti-doping agency (UKAD) is to help train its counterpart in east African track powerhouse Kenya for a year, it announced Tuesday.
A five-strong team is in Nairobi to start training Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (ADAK) staff, mirroring the work UKAD has already completed in Belarus and continues to do in Russia, where the anti-doping agency there has
been suspended since late 2015 over a state-sponsored doping conspiracy.
The UKAD contract with Kenya comes with the spotlight firmly on the country, with dozens of Kenyan athletes caught cheating in recent years, although very few of them by their national
agency.
Having narrowly avoided being barred from the last Olympics, Kenyan athletics was rocked last month when former Olympic and world 1500 metres champion Asbel Kiprop tested positive for the blood-booster EPO.