Robben takes the long walk off the field, hurdling the hoarding and removing his shirt.
"Off-Field Hurdles Stymie Indian Athletes" (front page, June 17) included insensitive comments about American Indians made by the men's basketball coach at Montana State University.
"It is difficult, it has been difficult, it will continue to be," Favre said of his off-field hurdles during a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
Selena Roberts's article, "Off-Field Hurdles Stymie Indian Athletes" (June 17), infers that because Indian athletes stay on or return to reservations and don't make tons of money and get huge endorsement contracts, they are not role models in their communities for kids "whose self esteem can become threadbare".
He has been beaten out of sight in four of his last five starts and it looks as though he achieved little in landing a small-field hurdle race at Aintree in November.
"An enterprising young physician-researcher who seeks to make his name in a field faces huge hurdles if he wants to work with pregnant women," Sachs told me.
But going out on an athletics field doing 100m hurdles or throwing a discus, that to me was a challenge.
Britain's Perri Shakes-Drayton defeated a world-class 400m hurdles field at the London Diamond League with a personal best to emerge as a genuine Olympic medal contender at the perfect time.
Commonwealth Games contender Ben Reynolds was a notable absentee from the men's 110m hurdles field while another Glasgow-bound athlete Daniel Mooney finished sixth in a high-quality men's 1500m won by Ciaran O'Lionaird.
An hour after the admirable Lough Derg failed by an on-the-nod head to concede 16lb to Serabad at Ascot, his David Pipe stablemate Ashkazar booked his place in the Champion Hurdle field by out-toughing Whiteoak and Punjabi in the Kingwell Hurdle at Wincanton.
All sorts of other considerations emotional, psychological, political, industrial come into play; some make for open fields, others for hurdles, and still others for stumbling blocks.
