Category: Athletics

Athletics News

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LA 2028 Olympics adds swimming sprints and mixed-gender gymnastics

  • LA28 will feature 28 more medal events than Paris 2024
  • Swimming to add 50m back, 50m breast and 50m fly
  • Mixed-gender events added in artistic gymnastics, golf

Sprint-distance swimming races and mixed-gender events in artistic gymnastics and golf are among the additions to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, after the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) approval of a record 351 medal events on Wednesday.

The LA28 schedule includes the Olympic debuts of the 50m backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly for both men and women, and a mixed 4x100m relay on the track.

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Sport in 2024: the moments that made us smile

Guardian writers recall their memorable occasions over the past year, from fraternity in the F1 paddock to an indiscreet moment in the darts

You hear all sorts of whispers at the Olympics; my favourite this year was about the 61-year-old grandmother Ni Xialian, who had an outside shot in the women’s table tennis. She won world titles for China in the early 1980s, then fell in love with another player, Tommy Danielsson, and moved to Luxembourg to run a hotel. She still plays and at this year’s Games she won her first match but lost to the world champion in the second. Afterwards, she spent a happy hour offering life advice to the assembled press. “I was worried if I was good enough, but if you never play, you’ll never know,” she said, “and as I always say: ‘I’m always younger today than I will be tomorrow.’” Andy Bull

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Generation TikTok: how sportswomen set the bar higher than the men

Female athlete power on social media became ever more strident in 2024 – but the backlash also damaged careers and wellbeing

Lina Nielsen remembers the moment she had the idea. She was sitting around the Olympic Village in Paris with her sprinting teammates – and she was bored. “I said to Yemi Mary John: ‘I’m gonna make this TikTok’,” Nielsen recalls. She took herself to her bedroom, got out the flip phone each athlete had been given and typed into an Excel spreadsheet: “Where you at? Holla at me.”

Her five-second spoof of Kelly Rowland’s music-video texting fail took hardly longer than that to make. It also got 8m views. “It’s funny that the videos that do that best are the ones you don’t put any effort in,” says Nielsen with a laugh. She is still trying to make sense of the fact that her TikTok channel was the most popular of any British athlete at the Games, beating even the knit-tastic Tom Daley in second place. At the end of the Olympic fortnight her channels had been viewed by more than the Australian and German teams combined.

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Sebastian Coe pledges radical reform in race to become next IOC president

  • Manifesto to share power and ‘safeguard’ female sport
  • World Athletics head highlights London 2012 track record

Sebastian Coe has promised to radically transform the International Olympic Committee if he is elected its next president in March – and says his track record of delivering at the London 2012 Games and at World Athletics shows he is the right choice for the leading job in sport.

In launching a manifesto that positions him as a reform candidate who will ensure the IOC does far more to innovate, protect female sport, allow more debate, and get more young people into Olympic sport, Coe took himself back to the early 2000s when he was able persuade the IOC to bring the 2012 Games to London.

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‘Big dreamer’ Keely Hodgkinson named BBC Sports Personality of the Year

  • Olympic 800m champion rewarded for remarkable year
  • Darts prodigy Luke Littler, 17, second; Joe Root third

No one could stop Keely Hodgkinson on the track in 2024 – or, as it turned out, the battle for public opinion as the Olympic 800m champion lifted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.

“As a little girl, I dared to dream big,” said the 22-year-old from Atherton, near Wigan, after being rewarded for a remarkable year, in which she won Olympic and European gold, obliterated her own British record, and remained unbeaten over two laps.

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Keely Hodgkinson wins BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2024 – as it happened

The Olympic 800m champion took the big prize in the BBC’s annual jamboree, with darts star Luke Littler second and Joe Root third

Root has a live chat from his hotel in New Zealand. It’s just gone 8am there, the morning after the Test series ended, and he’s looking a little bleary-eyed. Only once, in 2021, has he scored more runs than he has this year. “It’s been a hell of a journey, but it seems to get more and more enjoyable,” he says.

Jimmy Anderson on Root. You won’t get many better quotes than this.

I can’t think of a better role model for the game of cricket. I’ve got children, I’d love for them to grow up and be that sort of person.

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Athletics the biggest loser in funding cut of nearly £1.75m for LA 2028 Olympics

  • UK Sport denies athletics is on the ‘naughty step’
  • 8% cut despite best Olympic performance since 1984

UK Sport has denied putting UK Athletics on the “naughty step” after slashing its funding for the Los Angeles Olympic cycle by nearly £1.75m. The shock decision comes despite Team GB’s track and field stars winning 10 medals in Paris – their best performance since 1984.

UKA has struggled with financial and governance issues in previous years, while UK Sport is also understood to have questioned whether UKA’s chief executive, Jack Buckner, is too involved on the performance side.

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Luke Littler named on six-strong Sports Personality of the Year shortlist

  • Teenager could become youngest winner since 1958
  • Hodgkinson, Yee, Bellingham, Root and Storey included

Luke Littler will have a shot at becoming the youngest winner of the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award for more than 60 years, after being named on a six-strong shortlist headed by the Paris 2024 Olympics stars Keely Hodgkinson and Alex Yee.

The England footballer Jude Bellingham, the cricketer Joe Root and the Paralympian Sarah Storey make up the list. But, surprisingly, there is no place for Mark Cavendish, in a year when he broke Eddy Merckx’s record for Tour de France stage wins.

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Double Olympic triathlon gold medallist Alistair Brownlee retires at 36

  • ‘It just feels really right and I’m really happy with it’
  • Brownlees helped make Britain dominant in sport

The double Olympic triathlon champion Alistair Brownlee has announced his retirement. The 36-year-old Briton became the first triathlete to successfully defend his Olympic title when he retained the title in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, four years after triumphing on home soil at London in 2012.

“It’s time to close this chapter … This marks my transition from professional triathlon, a moment approached with both dread and excitement in equal measure,” Brownlee, whose first significant title came in winning the 2006 Junior European Duathlon, wrote on social media.

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