The grand old man of javelin throwing, Janis Lusis from Latvia, turned 70 on May 19th . The master of javelin throwing, who have Olympic medals of all values, who was four time European champion and who achieved his last world record when he threw the old javelin 93,80 at the Stockholm Olympic Stadium back in 1972, had his birthday party a little bit delayed. And in prescense of distinguished fellow Olympic champions Klaus Wolfermann and Miklos Nemeth he staged his own javelin competition in Valmiera and got the best birthday gift he could receive: a Latvian javelin thrower passed the 90 meters: Vadims Vassilevskis threw an impressive 90,71 to win the meet!
Have you been technical manager at a competition or are you in some other way familiar with the IAAF javelin rules? If you are you know that control procedure of one single javelin take some time – if you do it properly! So when the Swedish Athletic Association made an inquiry to the leading javelin manufacturers in the world about a proposal for new rules concerning the javelin control we were positive. As far as I have heard also the other top javelin producers took a positive attitude in direction of a change. And this is not a question of changing the javelins. It is a proposal concerning how to control all the limits of measurements! Let´s hope for a bright future for all exhausted technical managers!! We made some minor comments to the proposal but we surely supported the spirit of it!
Now the track & field season is winding up. In javelin Vadims Vasilevskis and Christina Obergföll (68,40 in Halle) are on the top of the leaderboard. Around the corner we have several big meetings ahead and I would like to make an extra call for Berlin ISTAF on June 14th and Ostrava Golden Spike on June 17th . The men will have their big clash in Berlin and in the Czech Republic Borbora Spotakova will face tough competitors on her home soil.
Yours in javelin
