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News18
07-05-2025
- Sport
- News18
World Athletics Day 2025: Date, History, Significance, Quotes and Facts
World Athletics Day aims to emphasise the value of sporting events as a universally accessible activity. World Athletics Day 2025: Every year, World Athletics Day is celebrated on May 7 to encourage people, particularly young people, to get involved in sports. It is a yearly occasion to recognise athletes and impart virtues like perseverance and drive that we can all learn from sports. The significance of sports and their beneficial effects on mental and physical health are emphasised on this day. World Athletics Day 2025: Date Every year, World Athletics Day is celebrated on May 7. This year, the day falls on Wednesday. World Athletics Day 2025: History advetisement On July 17, 1912, in Stockholm, Sweden, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) was established. World Athletics has been the organisation's name since 2019. The inaugural World Athletics Day was observed on May 15, 1996, which witnessed the participation of fifty nations. The festivities of the momentous day were initiated by the late Primo Nebiolo, who was the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations at the time. Even today, May 7th is recognised as World Athletics Day. World Athletics Day 2025: Significance Sports encourage inclusivity and diversity. The purpose of World Athletics Day is to emphasise the value of sporting events as a universally accessible activity, regardless of the result. The importance of participating in sports, including school sports, road running, and social duty, is emphasised on this day. It also encourages us to be conscious of our environment and how it affects our physical capabilities. Children and young people are also urged to participate and practise sports on this particular day. World Athletics Day 2025: Quotes 'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." – Wayne Gretzky. 'Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up." – Dean Karnazes. 'The only way to prove that you're a good sport is to lose." – Ernie Banks. 'The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start." – John Bingham, No Need for Speed: A Beginner's Guide to the Joy of Running. 'I'll be happy if I run and I can grow old together." – Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. World Athletics Day 2025: Key Facts In 1996, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which is now known as World Athletics, created World Athletics Day. It has been observed every year since to promote athletics and its advantages. The day also provides an opportunity to promote participation in sports for individuals of all ages and skill levels. Around the world, a plethora of events and activities are planned to honour the spirit of athletics on World Athletics Day. To encourage participation in various sports, towns, sports organisations, schools, and colleges often host races, contests, and exhibitions. In addition to giving athletes a stage on which to display their skills, these occasions encourage people to participate in sports. World Athletics Day honours the spirit of sports and their beneficial effects on people and communities around the globe. It promotes sports participation among individuals of all ages and serves as a reminder of the value of living an active lifestyle. As we celebrate this day, let's embrace the virtues of perseverance, teamwork, and sportsmanship and work to ensure that everyone has access to sports. First Published: May 07, 2025, 07:10 IST
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Inside the dirtiest race in Olympic history: ‘It wasn't fair. I wasn't on a level playing field'
The tunnel in which athletes wait before they enter a stadium ahead of a major race is 'by no means a friendly place to be', says Lisa Dobriskey – and as a former Team GB athlete who won Commonwealth gold and world championship silver at 1500m, she has stood in enough of them to know. 'Different people handle it differently,' she says. 'Some people are really relaxed and friendly; other people just look right through you. It's scary. I remember my coach saying to me, 'When you go to the Olympics, you'll be standing next to the meanest, toughest, hardest people that you'll ever face.' Everybody wants to win.' As it turned out, the wait to walk into London's Olympic stadium for the final of her event in August 2012 was even more stressful than she'd been warned. With British excitement at fever pitch, support and expectation for home athletes had reached near hysteria at times. 'It was terrifying,' Dobriskey says of hearing the 80,000-strong crowd in the stadium. 'People were yelling, people were screaming, it was overwhelming.' Advertisement Having come an agonising fourth in Beijing four years earlier, Dobriskey had battled her way into the London final after a nightmarish year. In early 2012 she developed a stress fracture of her thigh, delaying her track training for months; then in late May, a niggling problem with her breathing led to her being rushed to hospital with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Doctors advised her not to think about running for six months. Instead, less than three months later, here she was in an Olympic final, having won her heat and with commentators talking up her chances of a medal. 'That weight, that pressure,' she says, 'I took it all on personally.' Footage of the race buildup shows the 13 athletes lining up jumpily on the track, with Dobriskey on the far outside lane. Her name is announced first, to a roar from the crowd. She bounces on her toes, then stands nervously, her eyes closed, breathing deeply. A little more than four minutes and 10 seconds later, it was all over. Asli Cakir Alptekin, a Turkish athlete who had won the European championships title a month earlier, had again taken gold after leading from the front for the last 300m. Silver was claimed by another Turkish competitor, Gamze Bulut, after a surge to the line as several others faded. Bronze went to Bahrain's Maryam Yusuf Jamal. Dobriskey, who had been near the rear of the field and unable to fight her way back, crossed the line in 10th place, almost three seconds off the pace. She was bitterly disappointed, even embarrassed, at the result – but also deeply frustrated. A month earlier, after competing at a Diamond League meet in Paris at which a Moroccan athlete, Mariem Alaoui Selsouli, and Çakir Alptekin had raced seemingly effortlessly to a fast time, Dobriskey had privately contacted the world athletics governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, since renamed World Athletics), to say she believed the athletes were doping. Sure enough, days later Selsouli had tested positive for a banned diuretic – which can be used to flush other performance-enhancing substances out of the body – and been barred from competing at London 2012. Advertisement So when, moments after the London final, BBC Five Live's Sonja McLaughlan asked how 'comfortable' Dobriskey felt that Cakir Alptekin, the new Olympic champion, had previously served a two-year drugs ban, she told the truth. 'I'm very uncomfortable with that,' she said. 'I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying so, but I don't believe I'm competing on a level playing field.' The then relatively new athlete biological passport scheme (ABP), designed to detect the use of banned substances by comparing multiple blood results over an extended period, would be a big step forward in the fight against doping, Dobriskey said: 'But I think these Games came too soon. People will be caught eventually.' Then she went back to the athletes' village, packed her bags and headed to her parents' home in Kent. She had wanted to see her teammate Mo Farah race for his second gold the following day, 'but I couldn't go back. I remember my dad saying, 'Just go and soak it in, go and enjoy it.' But I didn't want to be there any more.' Dobriskey didn't watch a minute more of the Olympics on TV – and she still hasn't. Now living with her family in Arizona, where she co-owns a pilates studio, she even found last summer's Olympics in Paris too painful to watch. 'I just had to detach myself from the sport,' she says. Watching it now 'makes me feel like I didn't do enough, I wasn't good enough. Should I have trained harder? Should I have done better?' * * * Advertisement Dobriskey may have said what plenty of others were thinking, but her remarks brought her a sharp and wounding backlash. Though some fellow athletes and commentators echoed her suspicions ('Hate hate hate drugs cheats #FUCKOFF' tweeted the British steeplechaser Hatti Archer), from others there was a brutal smackdown. 'Don't think post-race insinuations by athletes who've been beaten achieve anything at all,' sniffed the former triple jumper Jonathan Edwards. But she would be vindicated in the end. In May 2013, Cakir Alptekin was suspended after abnormalities were detected in her blood profile dating back to 2010. After a lengthy period during which she was initially cleared by her own Turkish federation, the athlete was given an eight-year ban in 2015 and forfeited all her results from 2010 onwards – including her Olympic gold. (She would receive a life ban in 2017 after a third doping offence.) The new champion, Bulut, upgraded from silver, didn't last long either. The Turkish runner had shaved a near superhuman 17 seconds off her personal best time in the year leading up to London; those who had been sceptical about that achievement were proved right in 2017 when she was also banned for blood passport abnormalities and had her results annulled back to 2011. In the interim, two further athletes from the 1500m lineup, the Belarusian Natallia Kareiva and Russia's Yekaterina Kostetskaya, had also been suspended for ABP abnormalities. Their results, in seventh and ninth place respectively, were wiped from the Olympic record. Some of these athletes I had never raced before, because they had been either banned or had just come out of the woodwork Advertisement Yet another athlete, Abeba Aregawi, who came fifth in 2012 racing for Ethiopia before transferring to Sweden, was also provisionally suspended in January 2016 after testing positive for the banned substance meldonium, a heart medication that can be used by athletes to improve their endurance and recovery. Her ban was later lifted, however, as the authorities could not prove she had taken it after the date it became illegal. Then, last September, more than 12 years after the race, there was one final twist. Tatyana Tomashova of Russia, who surged to fourth in 2012 and had since been bumped up to silver, was given a 10-year ban for using anabolic steroids, detected in retests of stored samples from 2012. Her results, too, were retrospectively wiped. The penalty came as a surprise to some, given the length of time since the London Games, but in other respects, not so much. Tomashova won silver behind Britain's Kelly Holmes in the 2004 Games in Athens, but she was absent at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; at the time she was serving a two-year ban, handed down after her urine samples from different tournaments were found to contain more than one person's DNA. The revised results, then, would read as follows: the original bronze medallist, Jamal, was the new Olympic champion. Aregawi, who had been presented with a revised bronze medal in Paris last summer, would be upgraded again to silver. That meant American Shannon Rowbury, the sixth athlete to cross the line in 2012, would now be awarded bronze. Dobriskey's disappointing 10th place finish had, in fact, been a highly creditable fifth. Advertisement And for the London 2012 1500m women's final itself, its own ignominious reward: the title, widely attributed, of the dirtiest race in sporting history. * * * Rowbury was on a family holiday in Ecuador when she heard she was an Olympic medallist, after a journalist texted her agent with the news. She handed the phone to her husband, she told local San Francisco media soon afterwards. 'He said, 'Shannie! Oh my God, you're going to get bronze!' And I just started sobbing.' London had represented a huge opportunity for the American, who had bounced back from a disappointing Olympics in Beijing to win bronze at the 2009 world championships. 'It was like, OK: now London,' she says from her present home in California. 'I have one medal, I can do it again. Let's go after it in London.' Advertisement Once there and standing on the start line for the final, however, the race had presented a puzzle. As she waited for the gun, Rowbury says, she was acutely conscious of the others lined up beside her who had served doping bans. Her training had taught her to focus on her own race plan, 'but it was tough, because some of these athletes I had never even raced before, because they had been either banned or had just come out of the woodwork. It was confusing to try to make a strategy.' She, too, recalls an overwhelming atmosphere in the stadium, 'like nothing I've ever experienced before or since. Whereas Beijing and Rio were loud, it was sort of monotone, but in London the crowd, their energy, raised to an emotional crescendo as the race was going on. You could tell they were actually watching it, really engaged, and it just built and built. I had this out of body moment of, whoa, this is something special.' Her own strengths favoured a fast race, but it didn't work out that way. Instead, first Jamal, then Bulut, taking a quick lead, slowed the early stages almost to a jog. The tactic is often favoured by those who know they have a strong sprint finish: slowing to what Rowbury calls 'high school pace' forces their competitors either to sit behind at the leader's favoured speed, or burn up their own energy in a spurt to overtake. Some athletes are naturally fast finishers; others have some help. 'When you're competing against someone who's cheated, their bodies don't behave the way a normal, clean body would when everybody else is fading,' Rowbury says. 'They seem to have these other gears. They don't seem to be impacted by lactic acid in the same way as everybody else, because they aren't like everybody else. They've cheated.' It is striking, watching the final metres of the race, that two athletes appear almost to be accelerating in the final metres, like a pair of e-bikes on a hill overtaking flagging pedal cyclists: Bulut and Tomashova. Advertisement When it was over, Rowbury went straight to her then boyfriend (now husband), the Mexican middle distance runner Pablo Solares, and sobbed bitterly. 'The hardest thing wasn't that I had missed the medal,' she says. 'It was more that it felt like the race wasn't fair, and that no matter what I could have done, I wasn't on a level playing field. That injustice was hard for me to accept. If it was a matching of equals, I could accept that, well, today wasn't my day. But it was very hard to accept in a scenario where I suspected people were cheating.' * * * The London Olympics, ironically, were supposed to be the cleanest ever staged. That, at least was the pledge made by Britain's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in the early days of the Games. He was right that London had put in place one of the most rigorous testing regimes of any Olympics. Multiple doping positives aren't just disastrous for the athletes and nations involved – no host country wants to be associated with them, either. A state of the art testing lab, the size of seven tennis courts and with a staff of more than 1,000, had been built for the purpose in Harlow, Essex. There, more than 5,000 tests were carried out during the event's 16 days, more than any previous Games. During that time, just eight samples tested positive. But Hunt's assertion caused even some of those inside the drug testing establishment to raise an eyebrow. With athletes' samples kept on ice and available for reanalysis for 10 years as testing technology improved, no one expected the number of athletes caught cheating in London – leaving aside those getting away with it – would remain in single figures. As the same samples have been reanalysed with newer technologies in the years since, more and more doping positives have been found. By 2022, when it concluded its 10-year reanalysis programme, the International Testing Agency had withdrawn 31 London medals from athletes from 11 different countries. In one men's weightlifting event, six of the top seven finishers, including all three medallists, would be disqualified and banned for doping offences. Bronze was eventually awarded to the athlete who had originally come ninth. Anti-doping is all a shot in the dark because athletes are incentivised to do it as quietly and discreetly as possible Advertisement Worse was to come. When a Russian discus thrower who had won a silver medal at London 2012, Darya Pishchalnikova, wrote to the World Anti Doping Agency (Wada) later that year, admitting she had taken banned substances and asking it to investigate systemic doping in her country, it declined to open an inquiry, instead referring her case back to the corrupt officials on whom she was attempting to blow the whistle. Other reports in 2013 were largely met with silence from the International Olympic Committee. But it was harder to ignore a German documentary the following year featuring astonishing revelations from two Russian whistleblowers, 800m runner Yulia Stepanova and her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, a former official at Russia's drug testing agency Rusada. Up to 99% of the Russian Olympic team used banned substances, the couple told broadcaster MDR, and the country's supposed anti-doping establishment was in fact mostly concerned with covering it up. 'You have to dope, that's how it works in Russia,' Stepanov said. 'Functionaries and coaches tell you very clearly that you can only get so far with your natural skills. In order to get medals, you need help. And that help is doping.' The head of the country's Wada-accredited national anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, would later flee to the US to tell his own story to documentary-maker Bryan Fogel and the New York Times. The details he had to add were even more extraordinary, particularly about the Winter Olympics of 2014 in the Russian city of Sochi, when he was the head of the laboratory coordinating all testing. That had allowed him to drill a tiny mousehole between the supposedly secure room in which test samples were stored overnight and his own 'shadow' laboratory next door. At night, a team member would pass cheating Russian athletes' sample bottles through the mousehole; from there, a member of Russia's secret service, disguised as a plumber, would take them to its nearby command centre where the lids of supposedly unopenable bottles would be removed. Back in the secret lab, the urine would then be swapped for clean samples from the athletes that had been frozen months earlier, to which Rodchenkov and his colleagues would add distilled water or salt to make them up to the right volume, before passing the resealed bottles back through the hole. Advertisement The agency charged with catching cheats, in other words, was carrying out the most audacious cheat imaginable – and without the whistleblowers, it is likely that no one would ever have known. The revelations rocked the sporting world, and Russia was banned from the Rio and later Tokyo Olympics (the country's Olympic committee has since been suspended by the IOC due to its actions in Ukraine). But Russia's doping programme had been in place long before Sochi. In December 2016, Wada published its second major investigation into Russian doping. The country's Olympic team, Canadian lawyer Prof Richard McLaren concluded, had 'corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established'. * * * Rodchenkov would call London 2012 the 'dirtiest Olympics in history' and, strictly speaking, judging by the number of positive tests recorded, he is right. But athletics has seen successive scandals over decades, making it hard to know how many historical results could be called into question. Advertisement Under East Germany's state doping programme in the 1970s and 80s, for instance, at least 10,000 athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs, some without their knowledge. By Rodchenkov's own account, the reason his country withdrew from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles was not a geopolitical snub in payback for America's absence from Moscow four years earlier, but because LA port authorities had refused to allow Russia to anchor a ship containing its own doping control lab – designed to make sure Russian athletes' urine appeared clean – in the city's docks during the competition. Unable to be sure it could hide the extent of its cheating, he said, the politburo pulled out altogether. The Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson became perhaps the most notorious Olympic cheat after his 100m gold medal in Seoul in 1988 was swiftly annulled after three days when steroids were detected in his urine sample. The Sydney Games in 2000 were dominated by the US track star Marion Jones who won three gold medals and two bronze; she would later be stripped of them all and sentenced to six months in prison after admitting she had lied about using performance-enhancing drugs. Also at those Games, Lance Armstrong, fresh from winning his second Tour de France of an eventual seven, won bronze in the Olympic time trial – all later annulled in one of the biggest doping scandals in sporting history. Related: 'Imagine if a 60-year-old broke Usain Bolt's record': the story behind the Enhanced Games, the Olympics where everyone dopes Wada had been established a year earlier, in 1999, to harmonise international anti-doping efforts across hundreds of sporting federations; a succession of further measures have since been introduced to help authorities in the cat-and-mouse game between dopers and testers. The 'whereabouts' rule, by which elite athletes are required to provide continual updates on where they are to facilitate surprise testing, was introduced in 2004, followed four years later by the ABP. Advertisement The Athletics Integrity Unit, an arms-length body to combat doping and corruption, was founded by the IAAF in 2017. Meanwhile, in response to the Russian revelations, the US government passed the Rodchenkov Anti-doping Act of 2019, allowing US prosecutors to pursue those engaged in international doping conspiracies. How much of a difference have they made? It's impossible to know for sure, says April Henning, an associate professor of international sport management at Edinburgh Heriot-Watt University, who has written in detail about the history of drugs in sport. 'The most sophisticated and successful doping programme in the world is the one we don't know about,' she says. 'This is the nature of anti-doping. It's all a shot in the dark, because athletes are incentivised to do it as quietly and discreetly as possible, telling as few people as they can.' The most sophisticated anti-doping mechanisms won't stop cheats if the people involved don't want them to, she points out. '[Russia's doping scandal] didn't have anything to do with the sophistication of the testing or the way it was was carried out. This was a concerted effort to undermine the system, and because these people were placed where they were, with a lack of independent oversight, they got away with it.' In 2020, after all, no less a figure than the former president of the IAAF was convicted of corruption by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. Lamine Diack, a Senegalese businessman, had run the sports body for 16 years until 2015; at the same time, however, he had been operating a scheme that he called 'full protection' in which doping Russian athletes each paid hundreds of thousands of euros to make their positive drug findings disappear – so they could compete at, among other championships, London 2012. * * * Advertisement What it means for the modern-day athlete is a non-negotiable daily ritual to comply with the bureacracy of anti-doping. Every evening for 13 years until her retirement in 2023, the British 1500m runner Laura Weightman would set an alarm at 9pm to check in with Wada's Adams app, which she says every elite athlete has on their phone, to make sure she was where she was meant to be in case a drug tester turned up unannounced. 'It's just part of the job,' she says. 'It is something you have to remember every single day, and it can be stressful if you're travelling or have last-minute plans, but it's your responsibility to make sure that you support the bigger global picture of clean sport.' Weightman had just turned 21 at the London Games, her first major tournament, and hadn't been expected to make the 1500m final but, thanks to a blinding personal best in the semis, she had fought her way to a place, lining up beside her British teammate Dobriskey. Weightman, from Alnwick in Northumberland, had been dreaming of competing in London since, as a talented teenage club runner, she had watched the televised announcement of the city's winning bid – hosted by Steve Cram, who would later be her own coach. 'I'll never, ever forget walking out into the London stadium for my heats,' she says. 'In the tunnel about to compete, I felt so overcome with emotion that I was about to achieve that childhood dream. I felt I could cry because that emotion was so overwhelming.' With that excitement, she admits, came an innocence about some of her competitors. 'I was so naive about the world of sport that I had only had a handful of experiences of even being tested. I was aware of anti-doping in sport, but I just wasn't aware of the severity. I wasn't aware of how many would be cheating.' Advertisement In the end, exhausted from her semi-final, she crossed the line in 11th place – or sixth, as the records now show. At that stage, she was delighted just to have made the final. 'But because of the consequences of that race, you do find it hard to trust,' she says. 'You do wonder what's happening, but you have to remember along the way, you can't control what anyone else does. It makes you become incredibly proud of what your body can do. And to be one of the fastest in your country, one of the fastest globally on occasions, it makes you really proud to think, well, I did that clean, and I know I can say that, whereas not everyone else can.' * * * The new London 2012 1500m Olympic champion, Maryam Yusuf Jamal, was finally awarded the gold medal she should have won at a ceremony in Bahrain's capital, Manama, in December 2021. Though it may not have quite had the atmosphere of the London stadium, the presentation by a member of the Gulf state's royal family represented the culmination of a remarkable journey for the athlete, who had been born Zenebech Tola in the mountainous Ethiopian district of Oromia in 1984. As a child, she would run 8km to school every day; by her teens she was training competitively. But, despite running very fast times, Jamal says she felt she was unfairly shut out of the national squad. 'And I wanted to run.' Advertisement In 2002, while competing at one event in Lausanne, the then 18-year-old decided not to go home and instead applied for political asylum. Switzerland declined, as did the US, France, Germany and Canada, before Bahrain – eager to build athletic success, even if it meant adopting those from other countries – eventually came calling. 'And in the end, everything was good,' she says. 'Really, Bahrain has helped me a lot.' She couldn't train there, though – it's far too hot, she says. Instead Jamal now lives in Germany with her young family. She laughs when asked if she knew, as she lined up for the London final, which of her competitors were likely to be doping. 'Of course – every athlete knows,' she says. 'You'll see them once a year, maybe – they turn up and they go fast, even if they only run at the world championships or the Olympics. They don't want to run the Diamond League races because they're scared. But if you are strong, for sure, you can beat them – even with doping. I believe that. If you train hard and if you focus, you can beat them – like me.' * * * Like Dobriskey, Rowbury's career ended in disappointment, after her seventh place finish in Beijing and sixth (she thought) in London was followed by a gutting fourth in Rio in 2016. When it emerged in 2021 that Shelby Houlihan, the athlete who had beaten Rowbury's American record at 1500m at the 2019 world championships in Doha, had tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, 'I just felt, I cannot do this any more,' she says. 'I'd been burned so many times, I couldn't psych myself up for it.' Advertisement There has been 'a lot of pain, a lot of disenchantment and disillusionment' in the years since London, she says, 'but I refuse to be sad about good news. And this is good news. Even after 13 years, justice can be served.' She hasn't yet been told when she can expect to be awarded her bronze medal. 'It won't feel real until I hold it in my hand,' she says. 'That medal is a representation of so much more.'
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Inside the dirtiest race in Olympic history: ‘It wasn't fair. I wasn't on a level playing field'
The tunnel in which athletes wait before they enter a stadium ahead of a major race is 'by no means a friendly place to be', says Lisa Dobriskey – and as a former Team GB athlete who won Commonwealth gold and world championship silver at 1500m, she has stood in enough of them to know. 'Different people handle it differently,' she says. 'Some people are really relaxed and friendly; other people just look right through you. It's scary. I remember my coach saying to me, 'When you go to the Olympics, you'll be standing next to the meanest, toughest, hardest people that you'll ever face.' Everybody wants to win.' As it turned out, the wait to walk into London's Olympic stadium for the final of her event in August 2012 was even more stressful than she'd been warned. With British excitement at fever pitch, support and expectation for home athletes had reached near hysteria at times. 'It was terrifying,' Dobriskey says of hearing the 80,000-strong crowd in the stadium. 'People were yelling, people were screaming, it was overwhelming.' Having come an agonising fourth in Beijing four years earlier, Dobriskey had battled her way into the London final after a nightmarish year. In early 2012 she developed a stress fracture of her thigh, delaying her track training for months; then in late May, a niggling problem with her breathing led to her being rushed to hospital with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Doctors advised her not to think about running for six months. Instead, less than three months later, here she was in an Olympic final, having won her heat and with commentators talking up her chances of a medal. 'That weight, that pressure,' she says, 'I took it all on personally.' Footage of the race buildup shows the 13 athletes lining up jumpily on the track, with Dobriskey on the far outside lane. Her name is announced first, to a roar from the crowd. She bounces on her toes, then stands nervously, her eyes closed, breathing deeply. A little more than four minutes and 10 seconds later, it was all over. Asli Cakir Alptekin, a Turkish athlete who had won the European championships title a month earlier, had again taken gold after leading from the front for the last 300m. Silver was claimed by another Turkish competitor, Gamze Bulut, after a surge to the line as several others faded. Bronze went to Bahrain's Maryam Yusuf Jamal. Dobriskey, who had been near the rear of the field and unable to fight her way back, crossed the line in 10th place, almost three seconds off the pace. She was bitterly disappointed, even embarrassed, at the result – but also deeply frustrated. A month earlier, after competing at a Diamond League meet in Paris at which a Moroccan athlete, Mariem Alaoui Selsouli, and Çakir Alptekin had raced seemingly effortlessly to a fast time, Dobriskey had privately contacted the world athletics governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, since renamed World Athletics), to say she believed the athletes were doping. Sure enough, days later Selsouli had tested positive for a banned diuretic – which can be used to flush other performance-enhancing substances out of the body – and been barred from competing at London 2012. So when, moments after the London final, BBC Five Live's Sonja McLaughlan asked how 'comfortable' Dobriskey felt that Cakir Alptekin, the new Olympic champion, had previously served a two-year drugs ban, she told the truth. 'I'm very uncomfortable with that,' she said. 'I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying so, but I don't believe I'm competing on a level playing field.' The then relatively new athlete biological passport scheme (ABP), designed to detect the use of banned substances by comparing multiple blood results over an extended period, would be a big step forward in the fight against doping, Dobriskey said: 'But I think these Games came too soon. People will be caught eventually.' Then she went back to the athletes' village, packed her bags and headed to her parents' home in Kent. She had wanted to see her teammate Mo Farah race for his second gold the following day, 'but I couldn't go back. I remember my dad saying, 'Just go and soak it in, go and enjoy it.' But I didn't want to be there any more.' Dobriskey didn't watch a minute more of the Olympics on TV – and she still hasn't. Now living with her family in Arizona, where she co-owns a pilates studio, she even found last summer's Olympics in Paris too painful to watch. 'I just had to detach myself from the sport,' she says. Watching it now 'makes me feel like I didn't do enough, I wasn't good enough. Should I have trained harder? Should I have done better?' Dobriskey may have said what plenty of others were thinking, but her remarks brought her a sharp and wounding backlash. Though some fellow athletes and commentators echoed her suspicions ('Hate hate hate drugs cheats #FUCKOFF' tweeted the British steeplechaser Hatti Archer), from others there was a brutal smackdown. 'Don't think post-race insinuations by athletes who've been beaten achieve anything at all,' sniffed the former triple jumper Jonathan Edwards. But she would be vindicated in the end. In May 2013, Cakir Alptekin was suspended after abnormalities were detected in her blood profile dating back to 2010. After a lengthy period during which she was initially cleared by her own Turkish federation, the athlete was given an eight-year ban in 2015 and forfeited all her results from 2010 onwards – including her Olympic gold. (She would receive a life ban in 2017 after a third doping offence.) The new champion, Bulut, upgraded from silver, didn't last long either. The Turkish runner had shaved a near superhuman 17 seconds off her personal best time in the year leading up to London; those who had been sceptical about that achievement were proved right in 2017 when she was also banned for blood passport abnormalities and had her results annulled back to 2011. In the interim, two further athletes from the 1500m lineup, the Belarusian Natallia Kareiva and Russia's Yekaterina Kostetskaya, had also been suspended for ABP abnormalities. Their results, in seventh and ninth place respectively, were wiped from the Olympic record. Yet another athlete, Abeba Aregawi, who came fifth in 2012 racing for Ethiopia before transferring to Sweden, was also provisionally suspended in January 2016 after testing positive for the banned substance meldonium, a heart medication that can be used by athletes to improve their endurance and recovery. Her ban was later lifted, however, as the authorities could not prove she had taken it after the date it became illegal. Then, last September, more than 12 years after the race, there was one final twist. Tatyana Tomashova of Russia, who surged to fourth in 2012 and had since been bumped up to silver, was given a 10-year ban for using anabolic steroids, detected in retests of stored samples from 2012. Her results, too, were retrospectively wiped. The penalty came as a surprise to some, given the length of time since the London Games, but in other respects, not so much. Tomashova won silver behind Britain's Kelly Holmes in the 2004 Games in Athens, but she was absent at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; at the time she was serving a two-year ban, handed down after her urine samples from different tournaments were found to contain more than one person's DNA. The revised results, then, would read as follows: the original bronze medallist, Jamal, was the new Olympic champion. Aregawi, who had been presented with a revised bronze medal in Paris last summer, would be upgraded again to silver. That meant American Shannon Rowbury, the sixth athlete to cross the line in 2012, would now be awarded bronze. Dobriskey's disappointing 10th place finish had, in fact, been a highly creditable fifth. And for the London 2012 1500m women's final itself, its own ignominious reward: the title, widely attributed, of the dirtiest race in sporting history. Rowbury was on a family holiday in Ecuador when she heard she was an Olympic medallist, after a journalist texted her agent with the news. She handed the phone to her husband, she told local San Francisco media soon afterwards. 'He said, 'Shannie! Oh my God, you're going to get bronze!' And I just started sobbing.' London had represented a huge opportunity for the American, who had bounced back from a disappointing Olympics in Beijing to win bronze at the 2009 world championships. 'It was like, OK: now London,' she says from her present home in California. 'I have one medal, I can do it again. Let's go after it in London.' Once there and standing on the start line for the final, however, the race had presented a puzzle. As she waited for the gun, Rowbury says, she was acutely conscious of the others lined up beside her who had served doping bans. Her training had taught her to focus on her own race plan, 'but it was tough, because some of these athletes I had never even raced before, because they had been either banned or had just come out of the woodwork. It was confusing to try to make a strategy.' She, too, recalls an overwhelming atmosphere in the stadium, 'like nothing I've ever experienced before or since. Whereas Beijing and Rio were loud, it was sort of monotone, but in London the crowd, their energy, raised to an emotional crescendo as the race was going on. You could tell they were actually watching it, really engaged, and it just built and built. I had this out of body moment of, whoa, this is something special.' Her own strengths favoured a fast race, but it didn't work out that way. Instead, first Jamal, then Bulut, taking a quick lead, slowed the early stages almost to a jog. The tactic is often favoured by those who know they have a strong sprint finish: slowing to what Rowbury calls 'high school pace' forces their competitors either to sit behind at the leader's favoured speed, or burn up their own energy in a spurt to overtake. Some athletes are naturally fast finishers; others have some help. 'When you're competing against someone who's cheated, their bodies don't behave the way a normal, clean body would when everybody else is fading,' Rowbury says. 'They seem to have these other gears. They don't seem to be impacted by lactic acid in the same way as everybody else, because they aren't like everybody else. They've cheated.' It is striking, watching the final metres of the race, that two athletes appear almost to be accelerating in the final metres, like a pair of e-bikes on a hill overtaking flagging pedal cyclists: Bulut and Tomashova. When it was over, Rowbury went straight to her then boyfriend (now husband), the Mexican middle distance runner Pablo Solares, and sobbed bitterly. 'The hardest thing wasn't that I had missed the medal,' she says. 'It was more that it felt like the race wasn't fair, and that no matter what I could have done, I wasn't on a level playing field. That injustice was hard for me to accept. If it was a matching of equals, I could accept that, well, today wasn't my day. But it was very hard to accept in a scenario where I suspected people were cheating.' The London Olympics, ironically, were supposed to be the cleanest ever staged. That, at least was the pledge made by Britain's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in the early days of the Games. He was right that London had put in place one of the most rigorous testing regimes of any Olympics. Multiple doping positives aren't just disastrous for the athletes and nations involved – no host country wants to be associated with them, either. A state of the art testing lab, the size of seven tennis courts and with a staff of more than 1,000, had been built for the purpose in Harlow, Essex. There, more than 5,000 tests were carried out during the event's 16 days, more than any previous Games. During that time, just eight samples tested positive. But Hunt's assertion caused even some of those inside the drug testing establishment to raise an eyebrow. With athletes' samples kept on ice and available for reanalysis for 10 years as testing technology improved, no one expected the number of athletes caught cheating in London – leaving aside those getting away with it – would remain in single figures. As the same samples have been reanalysed with newer technologies in the years since, more and more doping positives have been found. By 2022, when it concluded its 10-year reanalysis programme, the International Testing Agency had withdrawn 31 London medals from athletes from 11 different countries. In one men's weightlifting event, six of the top seven finishers, including all three medallists, would be disqualified and banned for doping offences. Bronze was eventually awarded to the athlete who had originally come ninth. Worse was to come. When a Russian discus thrower who had won a silver medal at London 2012, Darya Pishchalnikova, wrote to the World Anti Doping Agency (Wada) later that year, admitting she had taken banned substances and asking it to investigate systemic doping in her country, it declined to open an inquiry, instead referring her case back to the corrupt officials on whom she was attempting to blow the whistle. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Other reports in 2013 were largely met with silence from the International Olympic Committee. But it was harder to ignore a German documentary the following year featuring astonishing revelations from two Russian whistleblowers, 800m runner Yulia Stepanova and her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, a former official at Russia's drug testing agency Rusada. Up to 99% of the Russian Olympic team used banned substances, the couple told broadcaster MDR, and the country's supposed anti-doping establishment was in fact mostly concerned with covering it up. 'You have to dope, that's how it works in Russia,' Stepanov said. 'Functionaries and coaches tell you very clearly that you can only get so far with your natural skills. In order to get medals, you need help. And that help is doping.' The head of the country's Wada-accredited national anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, would later flee to the US to tell his own story to documentary-maker Bryan Fogel and the New York Times. The details he had to add were even more extraordinary, particularly about the Winter Olympics of 2014 in the Russian city of Sochi, when he was the head of the laboratory coordinating all testing. That had allowed him to drill a tiny mousehole between the supposedly secure room in which test samples were stored overnight and his own 'shadow' laboratory next door. At night, a team member would pass cheating Russian athletes' sample bottles through the mousehole; from there, a member of Russia's secret service, disguised as a plumber, would take them to its nearby command centre where the lids of supposedly unopenable bottles would be removed. Back in the secret lab, the urine would then be swapped for clean samples from the athletes that had been frozen months earlier, to which Rodchenkov and his colleagues would add distilled water or salt to make them up to the right volume, before passing the resealed bottles back through the hole. The agency charged with catching cheats, in other words, was carrying out the most audacious cheat imaginable – and without the whistleblowers, it is likely that no one would ever have known. The revelations rocked the sporting world, and Russia was banned from the Rio and later Tokyo Olympics (the country's Olympic committee has since been suspended by the IOC due to its actions in Ukraine). But Russia's doping programme had been in place long before Sochi. In December 2016, Wada published its second major investigation into Russian doping. The country's Olympic team, Canadian lawyer Prof Richard McLaren concluded, had 'corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established'. Rodchenkov would call London 2012 the 'dirtiest Olympics in history' and, strictly speaking, judging by the number of positive tests recorded, he is right. But athletics has seen successive scandals over decades, making it hard to know how many historical results could be called into question. Under East Germany's state doping programme in the 1970s and 80s, for instance, at least 10,000 athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs, some without their knowledge. By Rodchenkov's own account, the reason his country withdrew from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles was not a geopolitical snub in payback for America's absence from Moscow four years earlier, but because LA port authorities had refused to allow Russia to anchor a ship containing its own doping control lab – designed to make sure Russian athletes' urine appeared clean – in the city's docks during the competition. Unable to be sure it could hide the extent of its cheating, he said, the politburo pulled out altogether. The Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson became perhaps the most notorious Olympic cheat after his 100m gold medal in Seoul in 1988 was swiftly annulled after three days when steroids were detected in his urine sample. The Sydney Games in 2000 were dominated by the US track star Marion Jones who won three gold medals and two bronze; she would later be stripped of them all and sentenced to six months in prison after admitting she had lied about using performance-enhancing drugs. Also at those Games, Lance Armstrong, fresh from winning his second Tour de France of an eventual seven, won bronze in the Olympic time trial – all later annulled in one of the biggest doping scandals in sporting history. Wada had been established a year earlier, in 1999, to harmonise international anti-doping efforts across hundreds of sporting federations; a succession of further measures have since been introduced to help authorities in the cat-and-mouse game between dopers and testers. The 'whereabouts' rule, by which elite athletes are required to provide continual updates on where they are to facilitate surprise testing, was introduced in 2004, followed four years later by the ABP. The Athletics Integrity Unit, an arms-length body to combat doping and corruption, was founded by the IAAF in 2017. Meanwhile, in response to the Russian revelations, the US government passed the Rodchenkov Anti-doping Act of 2019, allowing US prosecutors to pursue those engaged in international doping conspiracies. How much of a difference have they made? It's impossible to know for sure, says April Henning, an associate professor of international sport management at Edinburgh Heriot-Watt University, who has written in detail about the history of drugs in sport. 'The most sophisticated and successful doping programme in the world is the one we don't know about,' she says. 'This is the nature of anti-doping. It's all a shot in the dark, because athletes are incentivised to do it as quietly and discreetly as possible, telling as few people as they can.' The most sophisticated anti-doping mechanisms won't stop cheats if the people involved don't want them to, she points out. '[Russia's doping scandal] didn't have anything to do with the sophistication of the testing or the way it was was carried out. This was a concerted effort to undermine the system, and because these people were placed where they were, with a lack of independent oversight, they got away with it.' In 2020, after all, no less a figure than the former president of the IAAF was convicted of corruption by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. Lamine Diack, a Senegalese businessman, had run the sports body for 16 years until 2015; at the same time, however, he had been operating a scheme that he called 'full protection' in which doping Russian athletes each paid hundreds of thousands of euros to make their positive drug findings disappear – so they could compete at, among other championships, London 2012. What it means for the modern-day athlete is a non-negotiable daily ritual to comply with the bureacracy of anti-doping. Every evening for 13 years until her retirement in 2023, the British 1500m runner Laura Weightman would set an alarm at 9pm to check in with Wada's Adams app, which she says every elite athlete has on their phone, to make sure she was where she was meant to be in case a drug tester turned up unannounced. 'It's just part of the job,' she says. 'It is something you have to remember every single day, and it can be stressful if you're travelling or have last-minute plans, but it's your responsibility to make sure that you support the bigger global picture of clean sport.' Weightman had just turned 21 at the London Games, her first major tournament, and hadn't been expected to make the 1500m final but, thanks to a blinding personal best in the semis, she had fought her way to a place, lining up beside her British teammate Dobriskey. Weightman, from Alnwick in Northumberland, had been dreaming of competing in London since, as a talented teenage club runner, she had watched the televised announcement of the city's winning bid – hosted by Steve Cram, who would later be her own coach. 'I'll never, ever forget walking out into the London stadium for my heats,' she says. 'In the tunnel about to compete, I felt so overcome with emotion that I was about to achieve that childhood dream. I felt I could cry because that emotion was so overwhelming.' With that excitement, she admits, came an innocence about some of her competitors. 'I was so naive about the world of sport that I had only had a handful of experiences of even being tested. I was aware of anti-doping in sport, but I just wasn't aware of the severity. I wasn't aware of how many would be cheating.' In the end, exhausted from her semi-final, she crossed the line in 11th place – or sixth, as the records now show. At that stage, she was delighted just to have made the final. 'But because of the consequences of that race, you do find it hard to trust,' she says. 'You do wonder what's happening, but you have to remember along the way, you can't control what anyone else does. It makes you become incredibly proud of what your body can do. And to be one of the fastest in your country, one of the fastest globally on occasions, it makes you really proud to think, well, I did that clean, and I know I can say that, whereas not everyone else can.' The new London 2012 1500m Olympic champion, Maryam Yusuf Jamal, was finally awarded the gold medal she should have won at a ceremony in Bahrain's capital, Manama, in December 2021. Though it may not have quite had the atmosphere of the London stadium, the presentation by a member of the Gulf state's royal family represented the culmination of a remarkable journey for the athlete, who had been born Zenebech Tola in the mountainous Ethiopian district of Oromia in 1984. As a child, she would run 8km to school every day; by her teens she was training competitively. But, despite running very fast times, Jamal says she felt she was unfairly shut out of the national squad. 'And I wanted to run.' In 2002, while competing at one event in Lausanne, the then 18-year-old decided not to go home and instead applied for political asylum. Switzerland declined, as did the US, France, Germany and Canada, before Bahrain – eager to build athletic success, even if it meant adopting those from other countries – eventually came calling. 'And in the end, everything was good,' she says. 'Really, Bahrain has helped me a lot.' She couldn't train there, though – it's far too hot, she says. Instead Jamal now lives in Germany with her young family. She laughs when asked if she knew, as she lined up for the London final, which of her competitors were likely to be doping. 'Of course – every athlete knows,' she says. 'You'll see them once a year, maybe – they turn up and they go fast, even if they only run at the world championships or the Olympics. They don't want to run the Diamond League races because they're scared. But if you are strong, for sure, you can beat them – even with doping. I believe that. If you train hard and if you focus, you can beat them – like me.' Like Dobriskey, Rowbury's career ended in disappointment, after her seventh place finish in Beijing and sixth (she thought) in London was followed by a gutting fourth in Rio in 2016. When it emerged in 2021 that Shelby Houlihan, the athlete who had beaten Rowbury's American record at 1500m at the 2019 world championships in Doha, had tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, 'I just felt, I cannot do this any more,' she says. 'I'd been burned so many times, I couldn't psych myself up for it.' There has been 'a lot of pain, a lot of disenchantment and disillusionment' in the years since London, she says, 'but I refuse to be sad about good news. And this is good news. Even after 13 years, justice can be served.' She hasn't yet been told when she can expect to be awarded her bronze medal. 'It won't feel real until I hold it in my hand,' she says. 'That medal is a representation of so much more.'
Mint
22-04-2025
- Science
- Mint
Race to outrun humans: How humanoid robots are closing the gap
Seventeen years ago, biomedical engineering sparked controversy when South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, nicknamed the 'Blade Runner', qualified for the 2008 Olympics. Critics argued his Flex-Foot Cheetah prosthetic legs gave him an unfair edge over able-bodied runners, a claim that was dismissed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). At the 2012 London Paralympics, Pistorius made history by winning gold in both the men's 400 metres and 4x100 metres relay. While this human-machine endeavour may have rattled many, machines have also been independently outperforming humans at games. For instance, IBM's Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1996–97, and its Watson system triumphed over Jeopardy champions in 2011. Five years later, the world was stunned when AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Alphabet-owned DeepMind, defeated Go champion Lee Sedol . Now, AI-powered machines are attempting to replicate their success by competing with humans on race tracks, too, with mixed results. While AI drones have already outpaced human pilots, driverless cars have still faltered in race conditions, and humanoid robots recently stumbled through a half-marathon in China. Two years ago, the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zürich became the first to beat human drone racing champions with an autonomous drone—though it happened in a controlled flight lab. These competitions offer researchers a chance to test and fine-tune their algorithms under real-world pressure. On 14 April, an AI-powered drone from the Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory (MavLab) at Delft University of Technology outflew a world-class human pilot at the Autonomous Drone Championship. Organized by the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) and the Drone Champions League (DCL), the AI drone raced on a highly complex track, reaching speeds up to 95.8 km/h. It triumphed over 13 autonomous competitors, including drones piloted by human champions. However, the joy was short-lived. Just five days later, a very different picture emerged in Beijing when the E-Town tech hub hosted what was billed as the world's first humanoid half-marathon on 19 April. Even as 21 AI-powered humanoid robots competed alongside thousands of human runners, the results were humbling for the machines . According to Bloomberg, while the male human winner finished in just over an hour, the fastest robot, Tiangong Ultra—developed by the government-backed X-Humanoid research institute and funding from Xiaomi and UBTech Robotics—took two hours and 40 minutes. Ironically, it relied on a human runner carrying a signalling device to guide its path. Most other robots were either remotely controlled or shadowed by human operators. Similarly, consider the first race of the A2RL on the Yas Marina Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Formula 1 track held last April. It was, to say the least, underwhelming even as more than 10,000 spectators and 600,000 online viewers viewed eight AI-powered cars battling for a $2.25 million prize pot. Autonomous car racing has no human in the driver seat. It combines technologies such as AI, fast mobility stacks, innovative sensor technologies, and edge computing--where processing is done on the devices itself, reducing latency and power consumption. The A2RL race used Dallara-built single-seater cars and Super Formula chassis that come with a four-cylinder turbocharged 2.0-liter engine, generating about 550 horsepower. Seven Sony IMX728 cameras in the cockpit were the 360-degree eyes of the AI. The car had other sensors too and Lidar devices. Yet, the driverless Dallara Super Formula racers struggled to complete a full lap during the qualifying trials. Some turned into walls or simply pulled off the track for a break. And during pre-qualifying trials, the Fly Eagle car suddenly swerved out of control. Fly Eagle is a collaboration between the Beijing Institute of Technology, the UAE's Khalifa University, and Humda Lab from Hungary. The fiascoes notwithstanding, it was the Technical University of Munich (Tum) Autonomous Motorsport Team that won the race . While AI vehicles are expected to become more stable and fare better in the coming A2RL race, slated for the fourth quarter of this calendar year, for now the results are a mixed bag. MavLab drone's AI, for instance, uses a deep neural network that bypasses traditional controllers and sends commands directly to the motors. Originally developed by the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team as 'Guidance and Control Nets", these networks replicate the results of human-engineered control algorithms—while requiring far less computing power. Since real-world space testing was challenging, ESA partnered with TU Delft's MAVLab to explore applications in drones. The networks have been trained using reinforcement learning, 'teaching through trial and error", according to team lead Christophe De Wagter, who explained in his press statement that this process lets the drone push closer to its physical limits. "But to get there, we had to rethink not just the training process, but also how it learns about its own dynamics using onboard sensors," he said. In contrast, many AI robots or humanoids still rely on human guides, frequently stumble, have battery limitations, and encounter difficulty navigating uneven terrain. Though some robots demonstrated promising potential, the China half-marathon event cited above highlighted the current limitations of humanoid AI in dynamic, real-world environments. For instance, running a full or half-marathon requires sustained energy output. Even advanced robots like Boston Dynamic's Atlas have limited battery lives and would need frequent recharging or battery swaps—something not optimized for endurance events. Another sophisticated humanoid, Sophia (also a citizen of Saudi Arabia) from Hanson Robotics, is built primarily for human interaction, conversation, and expressive behaviour—not physical endurance or mobility. She's not designed for running or dynamic movement. Further, unlike humans, most robots don't yet have efficient thermal regulation or materials designed for repetitive impact over long periods. High-end robots are also expensive and complex, making it risky to use them in unpredictable outdoor environments where falls or collisions could damage hardware or injure bystanders. Navigation in a crowded, real-world race requires advanced real-time perception, decision-making, and adaptability. While Boston Dynamics has made progress, many humanoids still rely on controlled conditions or pre-planned environments. Despite the setback that humanoids have suffered so far on race tracks, the future may pan out very differently for many reasons. For one, robots aren't limited by fatigue, pain, or injury like humans. With enough power, they could theoretically run faster for longer. Advanced algorithms could optimize stride, balance, and pacing beyond human capacity. Future robots might use lightweight, high-strength materials and artificial muscles, improving both speed and agility. To be sure, several humanoid machines have made significant strides toward matching—and potentially surpassing—human physical capabilities. Introduced in 2000, for instance, Honda's Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO) humanoid was designed to assist humans in daily activities. Standing at 4 feet 3 inches and weighing 119 pounds, ASIMO could walk, run at speeds up to 3.7 mph, climb stairs, and recognize faces and voices. Its development provided valuable insights into bipedal locomotion and human-robot interaction, even though it made its last appearance in 2022. Boston Dynamics' PETMAN, unveiled in 2011, was developed to test protective clothing for the military. This robot could walk, squat, kneel, and perform push-ups, closely mimicking human movements. Its ability to balance dynamically and move fluidly marked a significant advancement in humanoid robotics. Atlas, also from the same company, was introduced in 2013, and has evolved into a fully electric humanoid robot capable of dynamic movements, including running, jumping, and performing backflips. Equipped with advanced sensors and algorithms, Atlas can navigate complex terrains and perform tasks autonomously, showcasing agility that rivals human capabilities. ATRIAS from Oregon State University is a bipedal robot designed to emulate the spring-mass model of human locomotion. Its lightweight design and efficient energy use allow it to walk and run with a gait similar to humans. ATRIAS has demonstrated stable walking in various environments, contributing to research in dynamic walking and running. Continued advancements in robotics and AI suggest that humanoid robots are steadily closing the gap in matching human physical performance. Humans will simply need to up their game to compete with machines on the track, or co-opt them as partners, which Paralympians do. Meanwhile, regulations both on-track and off-track will assume more significance. While on-track events may warrant a separate category for AI-powered machines, Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, introduced in 1942, which imagined ethical rules for robots--don't harm humans, obey orders (unless harmful), and protect themselves (unless it conflicts with the first two)--will need a revisit given today's fast-evolving AI. Updated laws to address real-world challenges like accountability, bias, and safety in machine decision-making, such as the European Union (EU) Machinery Regulation, which will apply from 20 January 2027, are a step in the right direction.
Muscat Daily
12-04-2025
- Sport
- Muscat Daily
Balushi sprints to gold at West Asian Clubs Athletics Championship
Muscat – Ali Anwar al Balushi won gold in 100m at the West Asian Clubs Athletics Championship in Qatar, further cementing his status as one of the most promising athletes in Oman. Representing Salalah Club and competing on behalf of all Omani clubs, Balushi delivered a decisive performance on Thursday, clocking 10.03 secs to win in a field packed with regional contenders. This victory follows his first-place finish at the Oman Athletics Federation Shield Championship 2024, which qualified him for the regional event. 'This victory is the result of months of rigorous training and discipline,' said national coach Fahad al Mashaykhi. 'Ali faced technical challenges earlier this season, but his focus and persistence paid off.' More than 400 athletes from 13 countries took part in the second edition of the championship featuring 23 track and field events. The 100m sprint was one of the most competitive races, with athletes seeking to qualify for upcoming international meets. 'This championship featured some of the region's best, many aiming for global qualification. Winning here shows Ali is both mentally and physically prepared,' Mashaykhi said. The event is officially recognised by International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) under its E classification, making Balushi's gold medal a qualifying result for future global competitions. Balushi is now preparing for the Arab Athletics Championships in Algeria later this month. His performance will also contribute to preparations for the 26th Asian Championships in South Korea in July and the World Championships in Japan in September. 'This medal is not only a reward but also motivation,' Mashaykhi said. 'It gives us a benchmark and helps shape our training strategy for the rest of the season.' Oman Athletics Association views Balushi's Doha performance as an encouraging step in its broader effort to boost the country's competitiveness on the continental and world stage, the coach added.
