Steve is another old stager who has worked hard to achieve success for so

Steve is another old stager, who has worked hard to achieve success for so long – I’m not sure people realise the effort it takes to come out and campaign season after season as he has. Now he, too, will say farewell at an Olympic final, a great way to retire. All athletes want to choose when they take their leave, not have wrecked bodies demanding they are put through no more pain. I hope Steve will do well in the final but, whatever the result, his is a great example.Yesterday held another bright spot for British athletics: Chris Tomlinson’s phenomenal performance in the long jump to finish fifth. Still 22, he nailed the first round with a jump of 8.25m, which left him just a few centimetres off a medal. That’s athletics at this level, the tiny difference between the podium and the rest. So much of the work is to achieve those few centimetres, those hundredths of a second, which make the difference.Chris’s reaction told us a lot: he was content with his performance, but disappointed to fall short of a medal.

He said he was going to work incredibly hard and listen to what his coach told him. Actually, we don’t want to inquire too deeply, to look beyond the surface; we want our hero, and we almost don’t care what he’s done. They seemed to be obsessed with the celebrity of their man, and they wanted their fairy-tale, of the Greek hero who beat the world, not to be troubled by the facts which the world’s media could not have covered in more exhaustive detail.That shocked me. Athletics delivers great feats, but they are achieved by real people who have worked hard, within the rules. I suppose I’ve always assumed that fans, spectators, also want the same, that to them, too, the sport means nothing if it isn’t clean.Here we had a protest for an athlete who was absent because he missed a test, then he withdrew himself from these Games. The athletes lining up are the fastest men in the world at this distance, because they have worked hard and done it cleanly So the crowd’s reaction seemed to say: we don’t care. The crowd’s reaction was a total surprise, and it did make me wonder.

I’ve always been adamant that doping has to be stamped out and the firmest of sanctions applied to any athletes who break the rules. The behaviour of the Greek crowd last night, which held up the start of a tremendous men’s 200 metres final here, really did shock me. Lining up were not just the three superb young Americans who stormed the race and swept the medals, but Frankie Fredericks, aged 36, in his fifth and last Olympic final, one of the venerable and popular greats of athletics. I’m trying to forget I have it but it’s obviously very hard.”Felix Sanchez sealed his reputation as the world’s leading 400m hurdler with a conclusive victory in a season’s best of 47.63sec after the challenge of his main rival, James Carter, faltered at the penultimate hurdle. Carter stayed on his knees with head on the track after being run out of the medals It was not an easy night for the Americans..

My gold medal is on my bed in my room and I keep stroking it It will be worn out by the time I get home. Holmes revealed afterwards that she had been in a restorative ice bath with fellow 1500m runner Jo Pavey until 1.30am.”I’ve got more than I expected in the 800m already,” she said “I know I’m in good shape Tonight I was just concerned about getting into the final. “I may have looked distraught after my last jump, but I know I’ve had my best competition ever.”Kelly Holmes’s ambition of winning an 800 and 1,500m double remained a going concern after she qualified with calm efficiency from her semi-final, eyeballing the race winner Natalya Yevdokimova after moving through from sixth in the final straight.If the whole performance looked icy calm, there was an unusual explanation. The 6ft 6in Middlesbrough athlete produced an opening effort of 8.25 metres, just two centimetres short of his British record, which put him in silver medal position after the first round of jumps.But Tomlinson was unable to improve, and eventually slipped back to fifth place in a competition won by the favourite, Dwight Phillips, whose own opening jump of 8.59m proved sufficient for the gold.”I never thought that my opener was enough to get a medal,” Tomlinson said. Until then, the athletes are free to race.”But not here, to the chagrin of many. Crawford and Gatlin, training partners together under Marion Jones’s former coach Trevor Graham, aroused indignation with their jokey antics in qualifying.