History
Primo Nebiolo, the Italian president of IAAF since 1981, was the founder of the Golden Gala and had the idea to bring the athletes and the people from the United States and the NATO countries together that were boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980 as a result of the Cold War. He died of a heart attack at age 76 in 1999.
At the 2009 edition of the Golden Gala, Kenenisa Bekele, Kerron Stewart, Sanya Richards and Yelena Isinbayeva all remained on target for the 2009 Golden League jackpot. In the 100 m, Tyson Gay equalled his American record and Daniel Bailey set an Antiguan record in the men's race. Antonietta Di Martino brought the sole Italian victory in Rome by beating off favourite Blanka Vlašić in the high jump.
Read more about this topic: Golden Gala
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crisesMof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (18601904)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)