Jane Saville was distraught after being red-carded. "I remember coming down the ramp and hearing people and thinking 'Wow, this is for me'." "I thought I am going to be just like Cathy, how good is this?" Saville said. There were 97,001 people excited about her imminent arrival on the track. Speaking from her home in Spain, Saville said she could hear the buzzing crowd of 97,000 sitting in the hulking stadium. With China's Wang Liping 30m behind, Saville was now minutes away from living out her dream. Saville took the lead but unhelpfully a confused Perrone continued for another lap before stopping. Perrone's restraint slipped and on the ninth 2km loop the Italian picked up three strikes. But she did well on the day and there were about four or five of the top women had been disqualified by the time she got to the lead," Cruise recalls.ĭeep into the race, Saville was hanging tough with the leaders but Atlanta Olympics silver medallist Elisabetta Perrone, of Italy, looked the winner.īut tension does strange things. "She would only have been in the top half-dozen. She'd been badly hampered by injury in the months leading up to the Games. Jane Saville was an Australian champion and a Commonwealth gold medallist but she wasn't among the favourites to win Olympic gold in the 20km in Sydney. "About 120 metres from the finish." 'I thought I was going to be just like Cathy' "In light of the experience of the 20km men, for the women's race I changed my position by moving to the end of the tunnel," Vacchi said. It was dismissed but it was all too messy for the chief judge. The Mexican president complained to IOC boss Juan Antonio Samaranch and an appeal was lodged with CAS. Vacchi was too far away on the course disqualifying another walker to stop Segura before he finished.Įventually, after Vacchi waited politely for the presidential phone call to finish and 15 minutes after he'd crossed the line, Segura was told he'd been disqualified. The problem was Segura's fast finish had been too fast and Cruise had slugged him with a third strike a few hundred metres outside the stadium entrance. Segura even took a phone call from the Mexican president trackside. Segura crossed the line first and Mexico was ecstatic. "If you start doing your maths with all of that, the loss of contact is generally somewhere between 30 milliseconds and 70 or 80 milliseconds," Cruise, who is the president of Race Walking Australia, says. Slow-mo replays and still photography can find two feet in the air pretty easily but judges can only determine a "loss of contact" by what they can see with the naked eye. Put simply, a walker must always have one foot on the ground. Here is the moment for a crash course in the rules and regulations of racewalking. "I was happy with this assignment and determined to do my job well." "When I got the call it was a great joy," Vacchi said. The 60-year-old's appointment as chief judge of the racewalking races at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 reflected as much.īut the bank manager from Italy also happened to be widely regarded in the sport as a genuine nice guy.Īnd when contacted by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in his home near San Benedetto Val di Sambro, a small town in the Tuscany region, Vacchi couldn't have been happier to share his memories of Sydney for the first time. So, after a 31-year career as a racewalking judge that included world championships and Olympics, Vacchi was no shrinking violet.
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