ANALYSIS: Knives out for old folks' Olympics

By Sid Astbury Oct 20, 2009, 10:46 GMT

Sydney - My time in Sunday's half-marathon at the World Masters Games in Sydney ranks me as the planet's 28th best long-distance runner for my age.

I'd be a fool to believe it: six months ago 22 Australians in my age group finished in front of me when I ran the same 21-kilometre course.

Welcome to the wonderful but whacky world of the seventh World Masters Games where 23,000 medals were won - more than 8,500 of them gold.

Hang on! How come there were not equal numbers of gold, silver and bronze? Well, in quite a few events there were not always the requisite three contestants to fill the three levels on the podium.

Great-grandmother Ruth Frith went home to Brisbane with six gold medals without facing any competition at all. The 100-year-old darling of the games also set six world records - mostly with a single throw.

'This event should be called a festival - not a games,' sports columnist Rebecca Wilson fulminated in The Daily Telegraph. 'It should not be played on hallowed turf, and it most certainly cannot be classified as an event worthy of anything put a few pars in a suburban newspaper.'

Wilson views the games as political correctness gone mad because anyone can have a go and perhaps receive the sort of adulation that usually comes only after a lifetime of dedication.

It's true: often the loudest cheer was for the person who finished last among their peers rather than the one who came first.

Wilson described the games as feeding a myth that we all can be elite athletes. She reckons a Lycra-clad 70-year-old trying, and failing, to pole vault half her own height is not uplifting but a disgraceful spectacle for the venue where the Olympics were held in 2000.

A lot of her criticism is valid.

Africans were virtually absent from the running races, there were Russians making clean sweeps of the table tennis championships rather than Chinese, and there were no South American teams to delight spectators at the football matches.

The Italian city of Turin will host the next games in 2013 and everyone is expecting a much higher standard of competition because more Northern Hemisphere weekend warriors can afford to attend.

And in 97 days time, in Bled in Slovenia, the first World Masters Winter Games will be held. That means more masters sports events.

Defenders of the masters argue that even the Olympics is not the sole preserve of elite athletes. They point to the floundering of virtual non-swimmer Eric Moussambani in the pool at the Sydney Olympics while representing Equatorial Guinea.

The World Masters Games is in its infancy but its growth is impressive. In Sydney there were more than 28,000 competitors. There were 100 competitors from the United States, some of them undeniably great athletes.

Mark Geyer, a former professional rugby league player who took his touch football team to the finals, is sold on the games.

'We've got this idea that when you finish your career as an elite player, you're finished, you've reached your use-by date, and what's left is sitting on the lounge and watching others do it on television,' 41-year-old Geyer said.

'But that's wrong. It's never the end. These athletes in their 60s and 70s are inspirational. You can keep on going and going.'

Geyer spoke for many when he lauded the games as making sport more democratic, less youth-obsessed and cementing the bond between exercise for the sake of your health and the rigours of competitive sport.

Geyer's view contrasts with that of other retired elite athletes who snub masters competition as something unseemly for past greats. British decathlete Daley Thompson famously said that masters competitions were for those who were never any good when they were young.

Someone who changed his mind about dipping down to the masters level was former Olympic swimmer Daniel Kowalski. He arrived as a spectator, felt 'a real buzz,' and plunged in to win a gold medal.

There were more than 230 former Olympians who took part.