• Injured pair return;Hockey

Let's hear it for the boy: Daley sets out platform for Olympic success;Div ing Britain's golden prodigy;Interview;Tom Daley;Factbox
Craig Lord in Eindhoven

1,402 字

2008 年 3 月 25 日

The Times

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72

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
* Aged 13, the youngest European champion
* Perfect tens after overcoming poor start
Great Britain were the toast of the European Championships last night when Tom Daley, 13, became the youngest European diving champion on record and the medley relay quartet shattered the European record in the race pool to double the national team's gold count.
At 5ft 2in and 7st 7lb, Daley was a diminutive stick of dynamite among much older and bigger rivals. On average nine years younger, seven inches shorter and 40lb lighter than the other 11 finalists in the ten-metre platform final, Daley outperformed the world champion and the World Cup winner to claim an historic victory four months before he heads to Beijing as the youngest member of the Britain Olympic team.
"It's amazing to be European champion ahead of that kind of field," Daley said. "It's totally unexpected. It's thrilling, like being on a theme-park ride." He ensured that the record for the youngest diving champion remained in Britain: the previous record for the youngest male winner was held by Brian Phelps, the platform winner in Budapest in 1958, aged 14 years, 4 months and 134 days.
After the third dive of six, the teenager was in sixth place after blowing one of his easiest dives. "I missed it and I was worried I might not be able to get back up," Daley said. But he donned his headphones to shut out the distraction of crowd noise - R. Kelly's The World's Greatest and Heather Small's Proud, the London 2012 theme tune, the teenager's choice for tuning back into the job at hand. "I like to listen to motivational songs. They help me keep focused," he said.
Daley struck back with three perfect marks of ten on his fourth dive and four on his fifth to take the lead with one dive left. "It was just amazing," he said. "I'm really proud of the way I handled it. I knew if I held true on the last dive, I could be the champion. I had to breathe deep at that point."
Daley nailed his last dive, but he knew that Sascha Klein, the World Cup winner from Germany who won the ten-metre event in Beijing last month, when Daley finished seventh to qualify for the Olympics, had a high-tariff (degree of difficulty) dive to come. Klein scored 9.5 across the board, but Daley had done enough.
On the deck, Andy Banks, the coach, hugged his charge, who then stood as the entire diving fraternity filed past to shake his hand. Rob, his father, broke through security to plant several kisses on his son's head, before saying: "I've got to drive back to Calais for the ferry in the morning, but I don't know if I'll be safe at the wheel. It's a stunning moment. My heart was leaping from my chest."
The tears are all the more understandable in the light of the challenging time that the diver's 37-year-old father has been through. When doctors found that he had a brain tumour, Rob hid the news, telling his son that his shaven head was part of a charity fundraiser. When the diver discovered the truth, he ploughed his feelings into training.
As hysteria built around him in the pool last night, Daley remained calm, just as he had in the competition. In contrast to his unsettled opponents, he looked unruffled throughout his six dives. How? "There's a lot of work gone into it back home," he said. "That gives you confidence. It's all the support system of people who have helped me, my school friends and the sacrifices I've made. When you stand up there you know that you can do it. It's a question of focusing and remembering what you have to do."
Daley will return to school at Eggbuckland Community College, Plymouth, tomorrow. Down the road, Sam Grevett, Daley's first coach, will grant herself a pat on the back. She recalled recently the moment she had first seen Daley as an eight-year-old dive off the boards. "I told Andy (Banks) he needed to see this kid dive," she said. "Tom used to hide behind the pillars because he was scared of the heights of three metres and the unknown. Even at 8, he had all the hallmarks of a great diver. He had acrobatics and, for a boy, he had pointed toes and straight knees."
In the past, Western nations have shied away from rushing such young talent up to the ten-metre tower, but Steve Foley, a former Commonwealth champion for Australia and now diving performance director for Britain, explained how Chinese research had changed all that. Indeed, Peng Li, the coach, has been brought in from the world's most successful diving nation to act as mentor to Banks and Daley.
"These youngsters can do the tower much earlier than we thought was the case," Foley said. "We were going wrong for a while because of our consciousness over child-protection issues. It could be that Thomas goes to London to aim for platform gold and then moves down to the springboard for 2016. It's the opposite of the way we've done it traditionally, but the way the Chinese have proved to be better.
"Thomas is much lighter and therefore much less susceptible to injury off the tower than bigger blokes. We've taken Chinese knowledge, but taken account of the child-protection issues, the cultural issues that are the norm in our country. You have to learn from the best in the world, but apply it to your system."
It makes for frightening moments, Foley said. "Thomas learnt a reverse 3 1/2 (his final dive in Eindhoven) only a month ago. That's incredible for a 13 year-old. He got scores of ten for it at the World Cup last month. He's amazing. I went down to see him in Plymouth and Andy said, 'Peng says he's ready.' I said, 'No way.' Peng said 'Yes', so I said, 'Fair enough.' Thomas's reaction was one of pure thrill, even though he was a bit apprehensive. He expects it of himself. When you talk to him, it's hard to believe he's 13. He comes across as a 19 or 20-year-old in terms of his knowledge of diving."
There are, though, plenty of moments when he is like any 13-year-old. "You'll catch him tucking into a packet of crisps," Foley said. "That's what kids do, but he's learning that it all changes when you become an elite athlete. We will have to watch his diet as the years go by. The other side of the coin is that his innocence is a brilliant thing. He's like a sponge for knowledge."
YOUNG GUNS
Tom Daley (Great Britain)
Was 13 years, 308 days old when he became the youngest European diving champion off the ten-metre platform in Eindhoven.
Brian Phelps (Great Britain)
Was 14 years, 134 days old when he became European champion in the ten-metre platform diving at the 1958 championships in Budapest. Two years later, he won the bronze in the same event at the Olympic Games in Rome.
Isabelle White (Great Britain)
Was 17 years, 308 days old when she won bronze in the inaugural women's ten metre platform at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.
Fu Mingxia (China)
Was 12 years, 144 days old when she became the youngest world diving champion, off the platform, in Perth, Australia, in 1991. A year later, aged 13 years, 353 days, she became the youngest Olympic platform champion.
Marjorie Gestring (United States)
The youngest Olympic diving champion. She was 13 years, 267 days old when she won the springboard gold at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Nils Skoglund (Sweden)
The youngest male medal-winner in any Olympic sport. He won the silver in the plain high-diving event at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp when he was 14 years and 11 days old.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
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Sport

Drugs policy will help Britain to clean up;Special report Cycling

Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter

1,366 字

2008 年 3 月 25 日

The Times

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68

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
Young athletes are being taught that doping will not be tolerated and will be given all the help they need to resist temptation
A leading British cyclist was once dropped from the national team under suspicion of having taken performance-enhancing drugs. Other top riders have missed two dope tests, one away from the "three strikes and you are out" rule. And three British riders in professional road-racing teams have made phone calls to British Cycling's headquarters in Manchester with serious concerns about the doping situation surrounding them.
All these facts are offered freely and happily by Dave Brailsford, the performance director of British Cycling, because the track cycling World Championships begin in Manchester tomorrow and there are two glaring facts that run dangerously parallel.
First, British cyclists are set to win a decent haul of medals this week and may be Britain's leading group of medal-winners at the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer. Secondly, cycling, for many, equals performance-enhancing drugs. This is damaging for British Cycling and unfair on those who ride clean. On the eve of Britain's home championships, it might have been more obvious for Brailsford to have kept doping out of the newspapers, but he has elected to persuade readers why they should believe in the Britain team and enjoy their success.
He does not suggest that British riders are insusceptible. Indeed, he has identified two windows when they need watching. First, when they are young and leave home for the first time to join the British Cycling academy in Manchester. "That is a big transition and they are desperate to make it," he said. "Those kids are vulnerable." And, secondly, when they join professional cycling teams. "They leave the set-up here and are pretty much on their own," Brailsford said. "And you think, 'It's the only thing they've ever wanted in their lives, for the first few months maybe results aren't going well and the doc or one of the old pros might offer them something.' That's someone who's vulnerable and that's where we need to be.
"So we'll phone them up and ask, 'What's happening on the drugs scene? You been tempted? Anyone offered you anything?' There are three guys who have phoned up and said, 'I don't like what I've seen.'
"When you are confronted with this for the first time and some b*****d might be about to replace you in the team, that's a hell of a situation. Our riders out on the road phone our coaches two or three times a week. They just know that we're really behind them."
The clean culture, Brailsford explained, begins by instilling in the riders the belief that you can win clean and buying into what they call "performance by the aggregation of marginal gains". "If you look at every single element that could affect your performance, be it sleep patterns, fish oils or whatever, and go after it absolutely full-on, you will get a natural performance enhancement," he said. "It's all or nothing. We start off with our young academy riders saying, 'Do it all and you can compete clean.'
"Herein lies our advantage: for 99per cent of those who take drugs, there's a point when it becomes a crutch and so they stop doing all the little things they might have done in the first place. They rely on the drugs to give them the performance boost. If you get someone who does both absolute full-on attitude and performance-enhancing drugs, too, then, yes, you have difficulty competing. But most of them don't."
This culture is backed up by statistics. Aside from the normal dope-testing procedures, British Cycling carries out four in-house blood tests a year so it can monitor any sudden swings in the blood profile of riders. A better monitor, perhaps, is that every cyclist's workout can be measured physically - wattage, heart-rate, etc - "and if we see significant change, we say, 'Hold on, what's going on?'
"I've always said to every rider who wants to ride for GB, we need to see their blood, we want to know what they're doing. And if there's any shadow of doubt, then I won't select them. We have built too much here to let it be taken away by somebody cheating.
"You've got to talk to people, you've got to know your athletes, know the ones who are more susceptible and you've got to be bold and talk to them. You (have to) front them up and ask, 'Are you taking anything?' You push and push and push and you tell them, 'If you want to take this risk, you could be ruining it for everyone else.'" Another key point, Brailsford said, is that "there is an obvious difference between the road and the track. The culture of the road is different." Does he believe that there are cheats on the track? "I think there are a couple," he said. Brailsford will say only that they are Europeans. "You just have to watch who goes off to Mexico or Cuba for two or hree weeks at a time," he said.
Which poses the question: if track has such a clean name, why endanger it with his plans to set up a Britain road-race team? His reply is that the team would be run like the junior squad training in Italy. "They live and train as a team, so you keep an eye on them all the time," Brailsford said. "They can't cheat, they're not going to start rigging up blood-transfusion units. It's not like a pro team who race as a team and then go back to the different countries where they all live. The great thing is you can control it." Indeed, doping, for Brailsford, should not be such a taxing subject.
Here is his cure-all method for road cycling. "With the amount of money invested in drug-free sport, I'd hire 20 doctors independently for the 20-odd pro teams and I'd send them to make sure they are clean: access all areas, stay in team hotels, travel on the team buses, go into people's fridges," he said. "And swap the doctors round every so often so they can't be bought off by the teams. I don't care about human rights - you'd be respectful, but give us the training data, the numbers. It'd be like a bunch of detectives."
The obvious flaw in Brailsford's brief is David Millar. Brailsford was with the British cyclist in the restaurant in Biarritz in 2004 when two French policemen arrested him. Brailsford was also arrested and questioned for five hours.
If British Cycling was the ultimate hardline organisation, it would never have been so closely involved in Millar's rehabilitation after his confession and two-year ban for taking a prohibited drug. For Brailsford, the Millar experience was "an eye-opener" and he "could have been more astute in picking it up. There was something about him that maybe wasn't balanced."
On bringing Millar back into the fold, Brailsford said: "I tried to make sure he was all right. At one point I was genuinely concerned for the guy. I don't condone what he did for one minute, but some people do make genuine mistakes and they do have genuine remorse. They may be few and far between, but I don't think they all need to be thrown on the scrapheap."
The Millar experience, he believes, has simply made him better at spotting and killing off the problem. "We've always set out to win the right way," he said. "And it's really hard for guys like ours who are clean yet who have to live with any cloud of doubt. We are big on winning, but it's not winning at all costs."
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
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Sport

IOC caution on Tibet;Olympic Games 2008

102 字

2008 年 3 月 24 日

The Times

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65

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(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
The IOC called yesterday for a swift end to violence in Tibet but said that the primary role was to deliver "the best possible" Olympic Games in Beijing this year. Stung by criticism that the IOC was doing too little to pressure China to improve the country's human rights record before the Games in August, Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, said the Olympics would help to change China. "The IOC has already expressed the hope that this conflict should be resolved peacefully as soon as possible," he said.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
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Sport

Kluft's Beijing defection brings an end to the fun and Games;Heptathlon;Athletics;Opinion

Simon Barnes

502 字

2008 年 3 月 24 日

The Times

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63

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(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
I am seriously thinking of throwing a pout and refusing to go to the Olympic Games this summer. The confirmation that Carolina Kluft will not be competing in the heptathlon has put me into deep mourning. She is worth travelling halfway round the world for on her own.
And do you know why she won't be doing it? Because the heptathlon is no fun any more. Can you imagine that? She has more or less turned down a gold medal, for she is undefeated in multi-event competitions for seven years. She didn't want the fame, the glory or the money. She only wanted the fun.
Kluft is from Sweden, not a nation famous for its sense of fun. She used to take a stuffed toy with her to competitions, but not as a lucky mascot. It was a sermon. The stuffed toy was Eeyore and its function was to remind her that sport is for fun. Fun-filled, she cantered past all the professional Eeyores, the fun-averse, single-minded professional athletes whose spiritual home is Eeyore's field, "rather boggy and sad".
In the World Championships of 2003 Kluft had two no-jumps in the long jump. You are only allowed three goes - one more duff jump and she was out. But she hammered into her third jump and practically flew out of the pit. These things simply don't register as a crisis if you are out there for fun. In the Olympic Games in Athens, I watched her struggle in the shot. On her last throw, roaring herself into defiance, she beat her personal best by two clear feet.
Hinterland. That's what it comes down to. And like most things in sport, it's a double-edged thing. Kluft pulled out these extraordinary feats of recovery, this wonderful series of linked performances, because there has always been more to her life than athletics. She studies "peace and development"; she works for Unicef; she has connections with a village in Kenya.
Kluft embodies the principle that sport is not, as commentators always tell you, "all about who wants it most". She showed that for her, it was all about who wants it least. But now, her hinterland has claimed her, robbed her of gold. She no longer cares enough. I salute that. In a way, it is more extraordinary, and more praiseworthy, than hanging on for one more gold medal.
I remember her winding the crowd into a frenzy, slapping her thighs and her face with ferocious, stinging blows, to drive herself to further excesses of performance, relishing every aspect of the occasion and always finding something more. She is going to try to qualify for the individual jumps, not because she has a gold-medal chance, but because it's fun. I wish her joy, oceans of it: but I am inconsolable.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
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Business

Growing appeal of London on the buses;UK Business

Angela Jameson

736 字

2008 年 3 月 24 日

The Times

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39

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
* Visitors brave weather for open-top touring
* Growth forecast after record year in 2007
The British weather may be unreliable, but London's open-top tourist buses enjoyed a record year in 2007, with the Original Tour sightseeing company reporting passenger numbers up by 8 per cent.
Profits at the operation, owned by Arriva, the North East-based bus and transport company, have increased ever year over the past decade - with the exception of 2005, the year of the London bus bombs.
The success of the tourist business, which was acquired in 1997 by Arriva, when it took over the Wandsworth bus depot in South London, has been largely unexpected. At that time, few expected Arriva to retain the operation over the long haul.
Colin Atkins, commercial director of the Original Tour, who was then working in marketing for the company, did not expect this publicly quoted transport group to keep the Original Tour for long. "They didn't understand us, but, to their credit, they let us get on with it and it has worked out. Arriva recognises that we do well in the group," he said.
The Original Tour's exact profitability is not stripped out in the company's accounts, but it is understood that the business is now profitable for ten months of the year, despite the British weather. When Arriva took it over, it was profitable for only five months of the year.
In the meantime, some sightseeing businesses have folded, although other tourist options - such as walking tours, taxi tours and even amphibious "Duck" tours (using venerable ex-US Army amphibious vehicles) - have opened up to compete with the Original Tour.
The company is hoping for similar 8per cent levels of passenger growth this year, particularly as the trend for Britons to holiday at home could work in its favour. This Easter, foreign visitors have been arriving early and huddling up on the top deck.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that British families are more inclined to stay at home this year. The Original Tour is hoping to benefit from this early start to its summer season and will begin to increase gradually the number of buses that it has on the capital's streets, up to a maximum of 100 in high summer.
Buses arrive at the sights, such as the Tower of London, every four to five minutes during the school holidays. On a chilly but fair day in February there were 30 buses criss-crossing the river, to take in the Globe Theatre on the South Bank and the Palace of Westminster on the North Bank.
The Original Tour's biggest single group of customers comes from the United States, but the days when American visitors would spend heavily are over. "We have to make sure that they spend with us, but we have to give them value for money," Mr Atkins says.
Tickets cost Pounds 19 for adults and Pounds 12 for children; in 1971 it was 50p for adults and 30p for kids. Tickets last for 24 hours and many people prefer to spread their travel over two days to get their money's worth.
Increasing numbers of visitors are coming to London from Europe, Mr Atkins finds, particularly since the expansion of the European Union. Arriva runs bus and train operations in a total of 12 European countries and has marketed the Original Tour through its other businesses, where appropriate.
"Within Arriva we are encouraged to pool knowledge, so we have had discussions with colleagues in Portugal and Italy, for example, about marketing and promotions," Mr Atkins said.
A core number of staff - drivers and tour guides - are kept on all year round, but many are hired seasonally and come back year after year. Drivers and buses are also hired out in the off season - ferrying rail passengers on replacement services, for example.
The