I remember one time going to a wedding and witnessing an argument between two women who had turned up wearing exactly the same shoes.
They were taking it quite seriously, for sure, nor was it resolved until one of them went home and came back in a different pair.
It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that a group of women yesterday lodged a complaint that somebody had turned up to the same event as them, wearing different shoes.
The result of this gripe held by the also-walkeds, so to speak, is that Yasmina Toxanbayeva, who had crossed the finish line well ahead of her second-placed rival, therefore winning Kazakhstan’s ninth gold medal of the Asian Games, was disqualified.
The Kazakh multi-medallist was competing in the 42.195-kilometre race walking marathon and crossed the line in 3 hours, 22 minutes and 20 seconds, almost four minutes ahead of the then silver medallist. The victory was soon called into question when the other walkers (presumably ready salted) protested that her ASICS shoe model did not comply with the official World Athletics list of approved footwear.
The question that remains for many people might be: instead of referees inspecting footwear well before the race began, as many sporting events tend to do, in order to avoid things like this going haywire, why was the race allowed to proceed, controversial trainers notwithstanding, for the result to be annulled after all the effort had been made? Couldn’t this have been resolved beforehand?
It’s not my place to second-guess the way that sporting officials work, nor to question the validity of their final conclusion, but surely all this could have been avoided?
Meanwhile, Toxanbayeva is likely to come back to her homeland a hero all the same, and in her own words, all the hungrier to go out and win gold medals for her country in the future.
