South Africa’s Monty Hacker quits as WMA acting president

Monty Hacker is about 74.

Winston Thomas of World Masters Athletics, reports: “As WMA Secretary, I have received a letter from WMA Executive Vice-President and acting WMA President Monty Hacker notifying of his need, for health reasons, to immediately resign from both of those positions. I would like to point out that WMA has a procedure for this situation written in its Constitution. This procedure involves the WMA Council nominating candidates and then electing a temporary replacement for both the positions in question. And that process is now being implemented and will be done in a relatively short period of time. It is anticipated that this will have little, or no, impact on the upcoming WMA Championships in Lahti, Finland.”

Winston concludes:

On behalf of the WMA Council I wish to thank Monty Hacker for his tireless work in the past 12 year on WMA Council, and we hope that he will have recovered within in a short period.

This is interesting.

Ohio’s Rex Harvey, a candidate for WMA president in Lahti, is currently WMA’s vice president-stadia, and would be a natural pick to replace Monty as acting president of WMA. (Monty took over when Cesare Beccalli died in January 2009, during his term).

But maybe the WMA Council wants to avoid the appearance of favoring Rex over rival prez hopeful Stan Perkins of Australia. We’ll see.

Monty has been around masters track for decades, but his name became most prominent in 2000, when he was part of an IAAF panel that lifted Merlene Ottey’s drug suspension and returned her to competition. (Here are details of the Ottey case.)