Plastic Brits

I read this article yesterday and agree with Angela Thorpe.

Losing my record to a Plastic Brit has left me devastated
By Martin Samuel

If Charles van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics, has a minute in his busy schedule today, he might care to make a telephone call to the watch manager at Dearne Valley fire station, in South Yorkshire.

Her name is Angela Thorp. And she was once the fastest 100metres hurdler in Britain. Not any more. That record is now held by an American, Tiffany Ofili-Porter, born and resident in Michigan, who switched her allegiance to Great Britain through her British mother, once it became obvious she was not going to reach the 2012 Olympics as a member of the United States team.

Ofili-Porter is unlikely to win a medal for Britain, either. At the USA Track and Field Championships last year, four American athletes alone were faster than her. Her best time this year does not put her in the top seven in the world (she is behind six Americans and a Canadian).

Jumping, but not for joy: Angela Thorp has seen her British record for the 100m hurdles snatched away by an American She was just fast enough, though, to obliterate Angie Thorp, whose record time of 12.80sec had stood for 15 years, from the history books.

Thorp is what you might call the collateral damage of Van Commenee’s self-serving recruitment policy: a Yorkshire girl who dedicated her life to athletics, and whose greatest achievement has now been erased by a Plastic Brit passing through our sport for purely selfish reasons.

‘Growing up, my dream was to run for Great Britain,’ Thorp said. ‘Ofili- Porter’s dream would have been to run for America. But she wasn’t quite good enough, so she came over here and took somebody’s place instead. And it upsets me, because we encouraged her.’

I did not contact Thorp. She tracked me down because two weeks ago I mentioned her name in a column denouncing Van Commenee’s policy. In addition to taking the place of a homebred British athlete, the stealing of Thorp’s record meant his convenient importation of talent was far from a victimless crime. Thorp appreciated the sentiment. She had wanted to say the same thing herself, only there are not too many soapboxes available for a 38-year-old former Olympic hurdler, whose name is not even in the record books any more.

Angie Thorp still lives in Wombwell, near Barnsley, and attended the local state school where the teachers spotted her athletic ability at the age of 11. She begged her parents to let her join Wombwell Athletics Club and her coach, Janette Tomlins, is still there. She is a grass roots volunteer, the soul of any sport.

Angie went on to run for Wigan Harriers and in 1996, in front of 96,000 people in the sweltering heat of the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, ran faster than any British woman in history to break the 100m hurdles record previously held by Sally Gunnell. And nobody went quicker until this year, once UK Athletics began tendering out places in the Great Britain Olympic team and a young woman from Ypsilanti, Michigan, spotted her main chance.

‘I knew my record would go, sooner or later, but I thought it would be to Jessica Ennis,’ Thorp told me. ‘I would have been the first to congratulate her, as Sally Gunnell did to me.

'I know Jessica, I trained with her. We used to joke about her breaking it. But to lose it the way I did, I just feel devastated. I was really proud of my record, 15 years and still going. And then it was gone, just like that. When I heard who had taken it, I felt absolutely distraught.’

Yanks for nothing: Tiffany Ofili-Porter was not deemed good enough for the USA so will likely run for Team GB National records can be obscure creatures. The casual fan - once every four years, if it is on the telly - thinks of the 400m and the name that springs to mind is Michael Johnson (43.18sec in Seville in 1999) not Iwan Thomas (44.36 in Birmingham two years earlier).
But, to those who turn out on frozen mornings in outposts like Wombwell, South Yorkshire, those lesser numbers have meaning. Those figures are the targets and the names in the record books are still the greatest of all time. And if you are a fire fighter with a dodgy knee, whose career was ended by injury while still in her twenties, being there in black and white as Britain’s girl to beat meant an awful lot.

It is the reason Thorp’s contemporaries such as Colin Jackson are equally outspoken on the Plastic Brits issue. They know about the frozen mornings, the dark and dreary sessions in driving rain, the sacrifices, the scant reward that comes from being an aspiring athlete in Britain. They recognise how it must feel when a young Olympic contender realises that dream is now further away than ever because of a policy without loyalty or ethic, one that asks only, ‘what can you do for me?’
‘Some days you had to grit your teeth to train, others felt like you had to grit your bones, too,’ Thorp recalls. ‘You’d turn up expecting to do one thing and the weather would just be too rough. Whole schedules would go out of the window.
'People don’t realise what it is like being an athlete in Britain in winter. I don’t know how it is for these other girls, but to come in on a flying visit and take people’s records and their place in the team seems so wrong.

A Brit special: Jessica Ennis is one whose position is certainly not under threat by outsiders ‘You should have to be part of athletics in this country for three years at least before you can be part of the team. There has to be a commitment. It shouldn’t be something that you can pick up and put down.
‘My grandparents were Scottish. If I couldn’t have made England’s team in the Commonwealth Games, I could have run for Scotland but I never dreamed of it. I didn’t feel Scottish, I felt English. I wanted to run for England in the Commonwealth Games and Great Britain everywhere else. I couldn’t imagine just going off to run for another country. I struggle to get my head around what these girls are doing, to be honest.

‘I have friends who I used to run with like Melanie Wilkins and they think it’s an absolute joke, too. They say to me, “You’re still the British champion really, Angie,” but look at the record books and I’m not. I’m devastated by it.’
Thorp now coaches at her old club, Wombwell AC, only part-time because her fire fighting duties are too time-consuming, and she has a niece who is a promising athlete. She says she would never discourage her, however angry she feels about the way her greatest achievement was callously disregarded.

‘I think what hurt the most was that after Ofili-Porter had broken my record, she made some disparaging comment about it being a starting point,’ Thorp adds. ‘It meant nothing to her but it meant the world to me and I feel as if I have been robbed.

Questions to be answered: Charles van Commenee's thirst for medal glory has badly affected some of the nation's athletes
'I sit here with my fingers crossed hoping that Jessica takes it from her. If I see Jessica’s name where mine used to be, that is different. She deserves it. But this is wrong. Everyone I know thinks it is wrong.’

No amount of pragmatic rationalisation or vainglorious flag-waving can make it right. Angela Thorp was the fastest hurdler in Britain and exchanged that career for one spent running towards fires and helping save lives. In her spare time she still coaches aspiring athletes in the town outside Barnsley where she was born.
There is something quietly heroic about her life and her contribution to British society, something of which she should be very proud; and now part of it has been erased from the records, so that the head coach of UK Athletics can pretend that he has created the eighth fastest 100m hurdler in the world this year; which he has not.

He should be ashamed and so should we if we think this is what international sport is truly about.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-2008394/Martin-Samuel-Losing-record-Plastic-Brit-left-devastated.html