Glasgow: Pickering wins 100m

The one with the backstraight headwind that blew off the register. It was 9m+ and was freezing? (The grandstand protected the home-straight a bit) but I’m thinking of Edinburgh Com Games.

It was so cold I was wearing a shirt, woollen sweater, leather jacket zipped to the collar and then the windcheater jacket and trousers over that. And I was still frozen.

That was the meet in which media baron Robert Maxwell promised to sponsor and then found a Japanese octagenarian multimillionaire to make good on the promise he (Maxwell) couldn’t keep. A few weeks later he “fell” overboard on his yacht and drowned.

I remember Ben won the Games and then was unplaced in some meaningless meet which Allan Wells won (from ancient memory). I think Ben was still thawing out from his Edinburgh Experience.

The only place that was colder for a meet that I have attended was for those few days at the 83 Helsinki worlds when global warming was a term unknown and it seemed like a glacier had reached the stadium gates. I had to go out (and I wasn’t alone) and buy a stack of snow-gear and gloves. And that too was summer.