Skip to main content

Laura Muir’s journey: from chasing lambs to racing for Tokyo 1500m gold

The Scot blew up in the Rio final but has a career as a vet in the background as her Olympic dream takes centre-stage again

When Laura Muir was a teenager, she was so fast that local farmers employed her to catch newborn lambs before they got lost. Now, though, she will have to chase two lions to win gold at these Tokyo Olympics. The first, Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, is going for an unprecedented treble of 1500m, 5,000m and 10,000m at the same Games. The second, Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon, recently ran the fourth‑quickest 1500m time in history.

However, the popular Scot is convinced she has a shot at the podium, which would be her first in a world outdoor event, and is in the “greatest shape” of her life. The bookies agree and make her third favourite for the 1500m when it begins on Monday.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3lfeOw3

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0

The danger in saying yes to Pascal Soriot’s pay rise at AstraZeneca | Nils Prately

Despite rebellion, approval of £18.7m package opens door to likelihood of US-style executive pay elsewhere Is Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, “massively underpaid”, as the chief investment officer of Florida-based GQG Partners, one of the company’s big shareholders, argued this week? Well, of course he’s not. Soriot has been paid £120m over the past decade, which is a helluva sum even for someone who has been brilliantly successful in leading what is now – but wasn’t when he arrived – the UK’s second-largest listed company. The history-turning moment in 2014, when AZ and Soriot managed to see off a bid from Pfizer’s grim number-crunchers, has probably been worth many multiples of £120m to the UK economy. But such a sum for a single employee in an organisation of 90,000 still looks absurd: Soriot doesn’t do all the work himself. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/V2FnCkM

Russia wants to ‘create havoc’ if it is behind DHL fires, says air freight expert

Goal seems to be for people ‘to lose confidence in the system’, says Brandon Fried after devices found in Birmingham and Leipzig Russia is aiming to disrupt western confidence if it is proven to be behind an incendiary device plot that led to two parcels catching light at DHL sites in Birmingham and Leipzig in July, an expert has said. The dangerous packages are not thought to have been sophisticated but in both cases appear to have evaded security checks . German authorities warned this week that a plane could have been downed if a device had ignited in mid-air transport. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/zgciEy7