Editor's Letter
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Go on, Hayley – 2012 is made for you!
AS rain battered most of the country last weekend, blue skies and even a hint of bleak winter sunshine greeted runners at the Euro Trials in Liverpool. It was appropriate weather for the women’s race, as Hayley Yelling smiled her way down the finishing straight to post a surprise and pleasant victory.
The 35-year-old was supposed to be retired, but she looked pretty in pink as she charged around the course with her familiar workmanlike style – her arms and legs working as effective pistons against the sapping nature of the muddy underfoot conditions.
Look up the word “stalwart” in the athletics dictionary (if one existed) and you will see a picture of Yelling, grinding through the mud, usually at the front of a field and never knowing when she’s beaten. Look up the word “unlucky” and she’ll probably be mentioned there, too.
Yelling has competed in countless world and European cross-country championships, plus world, European and Commonwealth events on the track. But on three successive occasions she has missed selection for the Olympic Games by the narrowest of margins.
In 2000 she fell just 1.27 seconds outside the 5000m qualifying mark. In 2004 she missed the 10,000m standard by an agonising 14 hundredths. In 2008 she was 4.29 seconds outside the 10,000m qualifier.
So now it will be fascinating to see if Yelling’s comeback gathers enough momentum to see her challenge for selection in 2012. Slightly younger than Paula Radcliffe, she will be 38 at the London Games and has never run a marathon before.
What a story it would be if she qualified. Although being a maths teacher by profession, she will no doubt already, as the Americans might say, have “done the math”.
WITH the athletics coverage in national newspapers dominated in recent days with stories about shamed sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, it will be refreshing this weekend for me to pay a visit to the English Schools’ Cross Country Cup (see preview, page 52).
Doping, Monty and Marion will be the last things on athletes’ minds as they run their hearts out for their schools. It is, quite literally, another world to the sordid side of elite athletics that unfairly often gains so much of the spotlight.
Jason Henderson, Editor
From this week's Athletics Weekly, - available in WH Smith and all good newsagents, or on subscription.
