Triathletes Take A Stand Against Doping
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Triathlon’s top athletes join together to support WADA’s Say No! To Doping campaign.
The biggest stars of ITU Triathlon have a message and now they are ready to share it, after the official launch of WADA’s Say NO! To Doping campaign video in London.
A year out from the London 2012 Olympic Games, the new campaign is an initiative of WADA for athletes to show their support for Anti-Doping.
The initiative was first launched in partnership with the International Ice Hockey Federation and saw players complete the warm up with green pucks.
The ITU has picked lunchboxes, shoelaces and swim caps to carry the message in triathlon. The lunchboxes were first launched in Sydney, where some of the world’s greatest triathletes gathered together to create the campaign video, and in London last weekend a host of athletes used the swim caps and shoelaces in their warm-up for the 2012 Olympic preview races.
The video features athletes from eight different countries, Alistair Brownlee, Helen Jenkins, Javier Gomez, Mariko Adachi, Laurent Vidal, Jessica Harrison, Kris Gemmell, Emma Moffatt, Paula Findlay, Andrea Hewitt, Henrik de Villiers and Bevan Docherty pledging their support, across five different languages English, Spanish, French, Japanese and Afrikaans, to Say No! to Doping.
And as well as pledging their support, the world’s best also had more of a message to share. Alistair Brownlee, who went on to win in stunning style in London, said health and fairness were paramount to him in triathlon.
“I think sport to me is all about number one, being healthy and then playing fairly and racing on a fair playing field. I think the health thing is probably the biggest thing actually, I do sport every day because I like to be healthy, I enjoy the health, it’s just the worry of taking drugs for myself and everyone else’s health, that is a big big thing,” Brownlee said. “And then of course playing fairly as well is important, you want to be racing people you feel are on the same playing field as you and that’s what is important.”
Read more: Triathlon.org