Milion helped Haile with his 10,000m and 5,000m world records in the summer He has great potential. Running under 13 minutes shows that.”So does the competitive record Wolde carries with him into the senior ranks in the new year. He has twice been crowned a world champion at junior level in 1998, having won the junior race at the world cross-country championships in Marrakesh in March and taken the 5,000m title at the world junior championships in Annecy in August. In the later instance he followed in the immediate footsteps of the other great protege in Gebrselassie’s training group, Assefa Mezegebu, winner of the world junior 5,000m crown in 1994 and ranked second in the world this year with 12:53.84. The previous two world junior champions at the distance were not bad runners either: Daniel Komen, the reigning senior 5,000m world champion, and Gebrselassie, who has actually followed in the spikemarks of Wolde and Mezegebu this year.In June Gebrselassie was towed on course to the 5,000m and 10,000m world records by his young compatriots, in Helsinki and Hengelo.

Usually, though, Wolde spends his running life in Gebrselassie’s slipstream.”He trains with Haile three times a week in Addis,” said Getaneh Tessema, the Ethiopian who helps the Dutch-based Hermens look after the Gebrselassie group. A new ruling has enabled disabled players to compete in able-bodied club tournaments They are allowed two bounces. Ward competes in Division C of his local league in Kent and is not surprised that he holds his own. Rather the opposite, in fact.”A lot of people think they ought to slow it down for me My reaction now is to drill the ball back past them.

I should beat anyone who can’t put the ball exactly where they want to, which most people can’t I am a professional tennis player. I do drills when we’re hitting into a two- foot square box in the back court. We’ve always been together and that’s worth more than money.” And the local taxi drivers call him God and Alex Ferguson returns his calls.Inside the game, his judgement of a player has brought widespread respect. Simeone’s over-reaction was criminal and Beckham hardly deserved to be sent off for such a weak retaliation, but the fact remains that Hoddle’s chance of glory, which may never return, was considerably diminished as a result.Even so, I doubt if Hoddle’s attitude to the young man was governed by jealousy of his international potential and the fact that he has a famous pop star for a girl- friend. CONGRATULATIONS to Peter Pringle (“A deadly cloud of paranoia drifts across the US”, 20 December) in exposing the weaknesses of the Unscom report on weapons inspection. That felt like a huge mental barrier.” It was not the first in his life, mental or physical.Ward lost the use of his legs in 1991, a few days before his 21st birthday He had a fall and broke his back.

No one is.It is like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree which falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, and whether it makes a noise. Hill’s most striking feature, after all, is not the jutting jawline, but his ego, and how do you capture that with pen and ink?As Des Lynam put it: “Jimmy loves fame. He embraces fame.” To such an extent that he saw even the Anglo-Saxon abuse hurled in his direction by fans of whoever happened to be playing Coventry on a given weekend as welcome evidence that if nothing else, they knew who he was. He does not elaborate because pity is not an emotion he encourages either in himself or from others Life and tennis are tackled head-on. “It was so huge because I’d lost so many matches to guys in the top 20. A set down and facing a dispiriting defeat, Ward switched to all-out attack.”I was playing well, but he was just hitting winner after winner,” Ward recalled.