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January 29, 2006
It could be worse
As you can perhaps guess, I read BBC News mainly because of the latest headlines, feed-reading bookmark in Firefox. If it were another source, I'd scan those headlines, like a kid with a TV watches the ads.
Today BBC News is posting that race organizers in Lahore, in the east of Pakistan, are going to have 6000 riot police on site for their mini-marathon. Two members of the police for every five runners. It's not totally clear, but it seems to be a 1 km race. (So somebody should win in less than 3 minutes.) Apparently muslims want to prevent women from participating with the men, and the police are around to prevent disruption of the race. If I understand correctly, under Islam women and men are not supposed to run together. There must be a lot of folks who are upset if organizers think they need that many cops.
I'm glad we only need a few cops when we run here. They're not riot police, either, but instead around to help direct traffic, so runners can concentrate on their races, and drivers don't accidently run anybody over.
The cops I have seen at races are very hands off, very tolerant. Near the end of the Grenoble marathon when I was cramping up so severly I literally couldn't walk, I was physically next to some folks from the police there to direct traffic. They must've thought people like me were completely nuts to be putting our selves through that, almost to the point of needing a representative of law & order to step in and prevent us from harming ourselves, like I'd imagine they'd do if you tried to jump off a tall building for example. Yet they all remained very polite and restrained. Maybe they see lots of suffering.
Posted by Mark at January 29, 2006 06:53 AM
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