http://www.cbc.ca/story/olympics/national/2004/08/29/Sports/marathon040829.html"Marathon marred by attack on race leader
Last Updated: Sun Aug 29 15:57:59 EDT 2004
CBC SPORTS ONLINE - The final athletic event of the Athens Olympics took a bizarre and tragic turn when a spectator grabbed the marathon race leader with just five kilometres left on Sunday.
FROM AUG. 17, 2004: Security tightened after Canadian leaps into pool
A spectator grabs race leader Vanderlei de Lima at the Olympic marathon. (AP/Koji Sasahara)
Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil finished with the bronze medal after a man wearing a costume and a sign on his back ran into the race lane, grabbed the runner and pulled him into the crowd.
De Lima came back onto the course but quickly lost his lead to Stephano Baldini of Italy, who ran into Panathinaikon Stadium and crossed the finish line at two hours, 10 minutes and 55 seconds to win the gold.
"I was scared, because I didn't know what could happen to me, whether he was armed with a knife, a revolver or something and whether he was going to kill me," Lima said after the race. "That's what cost me the gold medal."
"It's a major tragedy," says CBC athletics analyst Steve Ovett. "It sickens me to see something like this happen. It's absolutely disgusting."
Roberto Gesta de Melo, the head of the Brazilian track federation, has written an appeal on behalf of Lima.
"Someone took him out the race and we are asking for a gold medal for our athlete," said de Melo. "Solutions like that have been done in the past for other events."
The protestor was identified as defrocked Irish priest Cornelius Horan, the same man who disrupted the British Grand Prix in July 2003 by running onto the course during the race.
Horan, who once wrote a book about an upcoming apocalypse, wore a piece of paper on his back which read "The Grand Prix Priest. Israel Fulfilment of Prophecy Says The Bible."
He was arrested and taken to a jail in Athens.
Mebrahtom Keflezighi of the United States finished second with a time of 2:11:29 and de Lima managed to salvage a bronze with a time of 2:12:11.
De Lima will also receive the special Pierre de Coubertin Medal in recognition of his "exceptional demonstration of fair play and Olympic values," the IOC said.
The medal is named after the founder of the modern Olympics.
The 2003 Pan American Games gold medallist had run ahead of the pack midway through the race, reaching the halfway mark in 1:07:23. But a pack of 20 runners, including world record holder Paul Tergat of Kenya, were not far behind.
But rather than fade with each successive stage, de Lima seemed to get stronger and managed to hang on to a 40-second lead for much of the second-half of the race until the spectator attacked.
The race began in the town of Marathon, northeast of Athens, 47.2 kilometres from the Olympic Village, following the ancient route Athenian soldier Pheidippides was said to have taken to deliver the news of a victory over the Persians at the battle of Marathon.
The conditions were, as expected, harsh on the runners. The temperature at the start of the race was 30 degrees and felt like 39 C with the humidity.
Runners began to drop out of the race at about the one hour and 20-minute mark, as the mix of hilly regions and long stretches of straight roads began to wear on the athletes.
It was the second time Olympic security allowed a spectator to disrupt an event at the Athens Games. A Canadian man wearing a tutu jumped into the pool during the men's synchronized diving competition.
But this incident was doubly worse, for it not only affected a competitor directly but also marred what is seen as one of the signature events of the Games, the last race before the Closing Ceremony.
"This is really one of the saddest moments in sport," Ovett said. "
Written by CBC Sports Online staff
