Walking: The red cards of infamy

When Sydney's Olympic dust has settled, Jane Saville and Bernardo Segura will probably be lost deep in the footnotes, the letters "dq" beside their names.

"Dq" for disqualified.

It takes a lot to get the esoteric discipline of walking on to the world's front pages but Saville and Segura achieved it during the Sydney Games.

Saville, a 25-year-old 'Sydneysider', reached the entrance of Stadium Australia, the home crowd's cheers ringing in her ears and the gold already in her mind's eye after 19.7 of 20 gruelling kilometres, only to be thrown out of the race for "lifting", walking's cardinal sin.

She spontaneously combusted into tears and cries of despair, providing the Games with perhaps its most heart-wrenching moment.

If anything, Segura's fate was crueller still.

The Mexican had already crossed the line first in the men's 20 km event and been allowed to parade around the stadium, start his first television interviews and accept his national president's mobile-phone congratulations before being tapped on the shoulder by a man with an expressionless face and a red card.

It verged on the callous.

No other event in Sydney matched the walk's drama. Whether it did the event any good, however, is arguable.

For many watching, it seemed more high farce than top sport.

The rules of walking dictate that competitors should have at least one foot touching the ground at all times. Disqualification follows three warnings.

Close television scrutiny, however, suggests that most competitors are cheating much of the time, making the sport a misnomer.

Perhaps it should be renamed the "pretend walk", "pedestrian running" or the "straight-legged jog".

The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) is reportedly aware of the sport's image problem.

Brian Roe, the Olympic track and field competition director, reflecting on the Saville episode, was quoted as saying: "It is a hazard of the event, any event based on some subjectivity...it will happen."

He added that the IAAF walking commission was concerned and looking to see if "there are ways that walking can be improved and better presented".

Surprisingly, however, most involved in the sport - apart from Saville and Segura, at the heat of their moments, as well as the entire populations of Australia and Mexico - are happy with things.

Robert Korzeniowski won both the men's 20 and 50 km events in Sydney but he has had his own heartbreaks, disqualified in the 1993 and 1999 world championships and at the 1992 Games in Barcelona - as he approached the stadium in second place.

The Pole said the important thing was to have well-trained judges.

He added: "On the television you can't see all of the race, and the warnings or disqualifications are given for the whole distance ... not for the 10 seconds you see on the TV.

"Race walking remains for me one of the nicest events in athletics. This is an event available to anybody because, when I travel round the world, I see people walking in the street, walking in the parks."

Norway's Kjersti Plaetzer, who eventually won silver in the women's 20 km after Saville and two other leaders of the race were disqualified in the final stages, even had praise for the judge who dared show Saville that final warning.

Although that judge would not have known of the previous two warnings, Plaetzer said: "I have a lot of respect for the judge for taking out Jane, not because she is Jane but because she is in Australia and in Sydney."

Even Saville fell into line, after recovering from her shock.

Interviewed at the time, she had said she needed "a gun to shoot myself", adding: "The race was not a good advertisement for race walking."

Within hours, she had cooled off and stopped walking on the wild side.

She had not been the only competitor to be disqualified, she said, adding that she opposed rule changes.

"I think it will make more problems for the sport than it solves.

"Everybody knows the rules and it is a very subjective sport anyway, so you just have to live with that."

- REUTERS