Alfred turned 70 this year. He’s not getting soft.
Our German masters blogger friend
Alfred Hermes is angry about IAAF’s failure to fly in masters for its renamed gala. He wrote me: “IAAF is obviously no longer willing to honor Masters during the Athletics Gala in Monaco. This decision was announced by the WMA in the run-up to the 2016 [WMA] elections. For this reason, WMA postponed the election of the masters athletes of the year 2016 to the end of the year in order to be able to take account of the achievements of the World Championships in Perth. Also affected are the Masters World Athletes of the previous year
Silke Schmidt and
David Heath. In 2015, IAAF had not organized an athletics gala to honor the Athletes of the year 2015 in Monaco because of the doping scandals. But IAAF invited them to the
Athletics Awards 2016, as the Gala is now called, but not Schmidt and Heath. It is a demonstration of low rating of Master sport.”
On his website, Alfred quoted WMA Vice President
Margit Jungmann as saying: “Our efforts to change that were unfortunately unsuccessful. This is a huge step backwards for us; we have to start with the new owner from the front. This is the situation that we very depressed about, but we will persistently fight to reach it again.”
One Response
This is indeed a sad state of affairs. I remember the photos of Christa Bortignon and Charles Allie with Usain Bolt when they were World Masters Athletes of the Year and what a positive message about Masters those photos sent to the world.
It would be nice if the WMA had some sort of ceremony to honor the AOY winners…perhaps at the World Championships held the year following the announcements.
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