As Olympic discus finalist Lawrence Okoye edges closer to becoming an NFL player, SPIKES pays homage to the athletes he’s following into American football, and a few other multi-talented sport swappers.
The European Indoor heptathlon champion Eelco Sintnicolaas tells SPIKES about his 100m sprint transformation, struggling to touch his toes, competing against Ashton Eaton and his famous namesake Santa.
European 100m champion and track pin-up Ivet Lalova wants to see more athletics in interesting places, and some very different kind of races.
Elite athletes past and present have been telling SPIKES how they would change the rules and shake-up athletics (you can read them all here). Now it’s our turn: so brace yourselves for sixty action-packed minutes of multi-eventing as we introduce the ’60-minute pentathlon’…
The beautifully dreadlocked Will Smith lookalike (pre-dreads) and world 100m hurdles champion Jason Richardson opens up about his gift for the shot put, habitual banana theft and taking over the world with no trousers on.
How did you celebrate winning silver at London 2012?
If I tell you ALL of the celebratory activities I’d have to kill you but the milder moments involved dinner with my family, Olympic sponsored parties, and making memories for a lifetime.
US 2004 Olympic shot put champion Adam Nelson is one of the sport’s great thinkers, and the vice president of the Track & Field Athletes Association. He believes the sport needs major structural reform.
“The problem with change is it usually means someone has to give up something – privacy, marketing rights, comfort – in order for the change to take place. Allowing the media and fans greater access to the athletes during warm-up or in the call room requires the athletes to change the way they prepare.
“Opening the rules on athlete sponsorship requires a change in the dynamic between sponsors, agents, and athletes. New advances in drug testing are often accompanied by massive invasions of privacy. Changes to competitive rules usually require some acclimation. It doesn’t matter what you change, someone’s going to get frustrated with it.
Former junior shot put world champion and Olympic finalist Natalia Duco is so good she’s had her artwork displayed at an exhibition in her native Chile. And now the 23-year-old has kindly agreed to let SPIKES show off some of her best work…
After Jess Coulson sang herself to under-23 Eurocross gold last week it got SPIKES thinking: always a dangerous prospect. We’ve picked out ten tunes you didn’t even know were about athletics. Or at least we like to think they were. Take it away, Jay…
10. Jay-Z – Run This Town
It seems pretty obvious to us that Jay, Rhianna and Kanye got together on this track in tribute to their pal Diddy, who ran the New York Marathon.
1 - The number of guinea pigs named Horst used to predict the winner of the Nordhausen shot put indoor meeting in January. Organisers are relying on the animal to predict the outcome of the competition, following on from the success of Paul the Octopus at the 2010 football World Cup. Horst has plumped for USA’s world indoor champion Ryan Whiting to beat Germany’s world and European champion David Storl.
4 – The number of times Haile Gebrselassie has DNF’d while running in a marathon in his 11 attempts at the distance. The Ethiopian endurance legend dropped out of the Fukuoka Marathon after 32km with a leg problem.
