olympic mtb'ing being pushed to be in wales Options

[SammyC]

A better analogy for sailing would be in a pool with a big fan....

[Fishd]

You think MTB'ing has it bad?

My other half is one of those horse-riding types and look at what they've got to contend with! (Sadly... SWMBO is not Olympic standard so I still have to work for a living )

Greenwich Park boasts a row of chestnut trees that were young at the time of the Great Fire, and 130 years old during the French Revolution. As the sun shone yesterday, courting couples of the iPod age lay beneath the same branches that sheltered King Charles II and his mistresses... ... ...The course plan seen by the Standard only skirts the Charles II chestnuts but it will make five crossings of avenues and paths lined on both sides by closely spaced and sometimes almost equally venerable trees. Hong Kong's crosscountry course is 10 metres wide - the Olympic standard. If that was applied in Greenwich, trees would have to go. Ms Jevans said the course could narrow to five metres to get through the tree lines. "Why don't they go the whole hog and have a one-metre course run with Shetland ponies," scoffs Rawlins.

Rather than use any of the many top cross-country courses already available the organisers have decided to risk damaging this Unesco World Heritage site to provide a TEMPORARY equestrian event course!

Oh, and to those who would ask why the London games would have MTB'ing in Wales... well:

At the Beijing Olympics, the horse events are 1,000 miles away, in Hong Kong. At the Melbourne Games, the equestrian competition took place in Stockholm, a different hemisphere.