When I was watching the World Cup final last night I found myself assessing the performance of the referee almost as much as the players, because he was English. It was a colourful match not just because of the bright orange worn by the Nederlands team but by the record number of yellow cards issued by the ref.
Its a thankless job being a football referee and the Dutch team felt that the winning goal should have been disallowed.
Its a thankless job being a race walking judge too, especially at international matches when video evidence is likely to show that anyone with any speed is unlikely to be maintaining contact with the ground.
Steve Taylor has done both. He used to put up with the abuse from the supporters at the local soccer matches but has progressed to much greater heights as a race walking judge. As the story on the front page this morning relates, he is off to Canada to judge in the world junior championships.
The photo above was taken in Canada at the opening ceremony for the 1994 Commonwealth Games in which Steve competed in the 30km walk. I was the athletics team official and shared a room with him for the three weeks.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge in the intervening 16 years but I hope that all Steve's decisions in Canada are good ones and that he doesn't have to use the outfit in the photo as a disguise.
By the way, the reference to the football team as the Nederlands was a follow up to my comments about the British incorrectly referring to Holland (which is only a part of the Netherlands). Manx Dutch resident Johanne Smythe supported me on this but went one step further to say that it was really the Nederlands, which begs the question why do we translate the names of foreign cities like Roma?
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