Sport Aid, supported by Band Aid and UNICEF, organised Run The World on Sunday 25th May 1986, timed to coincide with a UNICEF development conference. It was a worldwide event where, at 3pm GMT, a total of 19.8m runners ran, jogged or walked 10km to support African famine relief charities.
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| Coming up the hill out of Rushton, heading for Rothwell. Mark Guyett & I are in the centre of the picture (he's on the left). |
Official events were held in 274 cities over 76 countries - 200,000 Londoners completed the course in our fair capital, 50,000 ran in Barcelona, 30,000 in Athens, 20,000 in Dublin and 10,000 in Melbourne. The leg of it that I ran, with my friends Nick Duncan and Mark Guyett, started and ended in Desborough, going through Rushton and Rothwell on the way. I remember that it was a warm day, I remember the happy atmosphere and camaraderie amongst us all and I especially remember the seasoned runners coming back from the finish line as we passed Montsaye School and calling out “only another mile to go” as they went.
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| Nick and me, in training. As hard as it might be to believe now, those shorts were in fashion at the time. |
Over $37m was raised and it apparently still holds the record as the sporting event with the most participants in history. I’m proud to have been part of it.
As I recall, entry was contingent on you buying a t-shirt and they were iconic at the time - most of us wore them for some time afterwards. I kept mine and tried it on recently and was chuffed to find that it fitted me!
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| Me, earlier this month |
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| The t-shirt front and back |
Awesome! I did it in London with my friend, we drank 4 large cans of Holstein before the start and were dying for the loo but couldn’t move for 20mins after the start due to the large crowd 😂
ReplyDeleteHa!
DeleteI ran the race with my dad and his friends. I was 10 years old. I told my son today that grandad ran a race. He was dumbstruck.
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