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Jamaican sprint star Usain Bolt has signed a contract to race at the London Anniversary Games at the Olympic Stadium, according to a report on Friday. |
Bolt has agreed to compete on both days of the Diamond League meeting in the English capital on July 26 and 27, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The meeting is expected to attract a host of star names as it marks the one-year anniversary of the London 2012 opening ceremony. It will also be the first time the Jamaican has competed in Britain in a non-Olympic event since 2009.
He has stayed away because under British law the double Olympic 100, 200 and 4x100 metres champion would have had to pay tax on his lucrative endorsement earnings, but the British government recently announced a one-off exemption for overseas athletes taking part in the London meeting. The London Anniversary Games takes place two weeks before the World Championships in Moscow.
Bolt has already confirmed he will race over 100m in Rome on June 6, over 200m in Oslo on June 23, in the sprint relay in Ostrava on June 27, over 200m in Paris on July 6 and over an unconfirmed distance in Brussels on September 6. He is due to race over 150m on a track on Copacabana beach today. However, a UK Athletics would not confirm whether an agreement had been signed with Bolt, saying only: “We are working hard to put together the best possible field.”
Rome Golden Gala dedicated to Mennea: IAAF
London: World athletics chiefs will dedicate the Golden Gala meet in Rome this June, when sprint star Usain Bolt will compete, to Italian great Pietro Mennea, according to the IAAF.
Mennea, the gold medal winner in the 200m at the 1980 Moscow Olympics who held the world record in the event for 17 years, died in a Rome hospital last week at the age of 60 from an as yet unnamed incurable disease. Mennea won the 200m ahead of Jamaica’s Don
Quarrie when he competed in the first edition of the Golden Gala, a meeting designed to unite East and West in the wake of the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics.
The International Athletics Federation (IAAF) said Friday “the 2013 edition of the Golden Gala—the fifth leg of the 2013 IAAF Diamond League—will be dedicated to the memory of Italian sprint legend Pietro Mennea”. With six-time Olympic champion Bolt competing in Rome for the third consecutive year, the IAAF said “the presence of the Jamaican legend will be the perfect way to remember Mennea.” A 14-time outdoor Italian champion in his preferred events of the 100m and 200m, Mennea was perhaps best known for setting a world record of 19.72sec in Mexico City in 1979 which stood for nearly two decades.
It beat the previous record set by American Tommie Smith, and stood until it was bettered by another US sprint great, Michael Johnson, in 1996.
Affectionately known as the ‘Arrow of the South’ Mennea announced his retirement in 1983 but soon returned to win a 200m bronze at the inaugural world athletics championships in Helsinki that same year.
A year later he became the first person to appear in a fourth consecutive 200m Olympic final, at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
He failed to make the medals and, after yet another retirement, returned to competition in time for the Seoul Games of 1988 where he failed to make the final in his fifth Olympics.
Mennea later admitted to using human growth hormone (HgH) - a product that was not then on the banned list - to aid his performances.
Low-key return for Tamgho after 20 months out
Paris: French triple-jumper Teddy Tamgho will make his long-awaited return to track and field when he competes in a low-key outdoor long jump competition yesterday.
Tamgho, who has skipped the entire indoor season this year to concentrate on his preparations for the August 10-18 World Championships in Moscow, has not competed for 20 months.
But he has elected to make his comeback in the long jump at a small meet in the Lyon surburb of Bron in south France.
The road back has been a long one for the 23-year-old who underwent surgery on the right ankle he fractured in July 2011 warming up for the European under-23 Championships and a subsequent bone growth.