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ENGLAND CHRONICLES
The Flora London Marathon, dubbed as the most democratic of international sports events, is to take place ori April 13 on the streets of the capita] city. Besides seasoned long-distance runners, famed cricketers Graham Gooch and Allan Lamb, students and professors. celebrities and taxi drivers, housewives and Members of Parliament, the athletic and the academic, are all expected to take part in the 26 miles 385 yards course.
Streets of Central London through which the race will pass already have signs warning motorists that there will be disruptions and alternate routes on the big day.
The London Marathon, as many other such races all over the world today, is more than a mere sporting event. It is an opportunity for hundreds to raise thousands of pounds for charity. People run for the underprivileged and the handicapped, the heart foundation, the cancer research institutes and sim-
By Nizamuddin Ahmed
ilar benevolent organisations.
It is truly one of those competitions (or is it!) in which participation indeed is more important than winning.
England have selected a 12-year-old girl Katy Parker to represent the national table tennis side in the World Championship beginning at Manchester on April 24. Katy is the youngest member of England s 33-player squad.
Way over in the States. President Clinton will be honouring the 50th anniversary of the first black player to play Major League baseball this century. Bill will be making a speech on April 15 before the game between Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets. Since the new season began on April 1. every player has been sporting a small arm patch with the inscription "Breaking Barriers" to commemorate the historic occasion of breaking racial barriers when black player Jackie Roosevelt Robinson on April 15, 1947 first played. for the Dodgers, then based in Brooklyn, against the Boston Braves.
There had been black players for years before and till an unofficial colour bar was given effect in 1895, forcing many talented black players to play in loosely-structured Negro Leagues. There were prominent black players in athletics (Jesse Owens. 1936 Olympics) and boxing (Joe Louis) but they were individual events. Essentially the apartheid ban was effective in team sports when it was a question of blacks paying with whites.
Robinson was signed for the Dodgers against all odds by Branch Rickey, the legendary wheeler-dealer general manager of the Dodgers to play in the minor league in 1946. After taking the minors by storm , he was promoted to the Major League the following year.
' Rickey warned Robinson that there would be protests and jeers from officials as well as
players and fans. Even his teammates filled in a petition asking Rickey not to bring Robinson to Brooklyn, but the "boss" ignored it. At one stage in the first season, it seemed that the gt. Louis Cardinals, w.ould refuse to play the Dodgers because of the presence of Robinson but the National League president took a tough stance and warned that anybody refusing to take the field against Robinson would be banned for life. It worked.
Robinson transformed the Dodgers from underdogs to supremoes. In his ten years with them, Brooklyn won six National League titles and in 1955 they won the World Series for the first and only time in history.
Four more players joined .Major League clubs by the end of Robinson's first season. By 1959, every Major League club had at least one black player.
Robinson, a diabetic, died at the early age of 53. He provided his own epitaph which reads: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."
Thirty-eight horses, their jockeys and trainers, handlers and backers, and sixty thousand spectators had gathered at Aintree near Liverpool last Saturday (6 April) for the 150th Grand National. But, a coded bomb threat had the better of it all and the race had to be postponed barely half-an-hour before. All the sixty thousand people were evacuated in what has to be termed as a lesson in discipline and patience. Most of the horses were taken to nearby stables where they were fed and watered. But the spectators, many unable to take their cars before a full search was carried out. had to spend the night in makeshift beds on floors of nearby gymnasiums and community centres. The bookmakers were also in some sort of a tangle with seventy-five million pounds of betting money involved.
The race took place on Monday but with only ten thousand people attending.