Athletics: Christie coach is critical of IAAF

(First Edition)

RON RODDAN, Linford Christie's coach, yesterday criticised the over-crowded athletics championship schedule which has forced the Olympic champion to compete while injured in Havana tomorrow.

Roddan believes the World Cup team event in Cuba is a 'waste of time' and should never have been scheduled to take place at the end of an exhausting Olympic summer which has taken its toll on every top athlete.

He is also angry that international athletics chiefs keep placing more unfair demands on the world's leading performers by increasing the congestion of the global fixture list.

Christie runs in the 100m tomorrow, suffering from severe back and hamstring pain, while many of his senior British colleagues have opted to ignore the event because of injury, illness or weariness.

'This meeting is just a waste of time really,' Roddan, the man who has guided Christie through a back-breaking schedule of races already this year, said. 'It's simple - there's just too much competition and they keep asking too much of the athletes.

'It's ridiculous. We've got a World Championships every two years now instead of every four; in 1994, we've got the Europeans and Commonwealths in the space of a couple of weeks, and now they're talking about staging the European Cup every year and introducing even more new events.

'Linford wants to run the World Championships in Stuttgart next year because it's the one gold he hasn't got, but I don't think the world title means a thing now - the Olympics are what count.'

Roddan puts the blame on the International Amateur Athletic Federation chief, Primo Nebiolo, saying: 'It seems it's only Mr Nebiolo who wants two-yearly world championships. He's trying to make them bigger than the Olympics, but the event is being devalued.'

Roddan would not be the only one not to mourn the passing of the World Cup if, as seems likely, it is staged for the last time in Cuba. No one seems to have a good word for the event which pits three countries, the United States and Europe's top two, against a series of makeshift teams representing the five Continents.