The IAAF Diamond League 2018 meet in Doha was the scene of eight best performances of the year and five meeting records. Five of the winners have confirmed their participation in the Monaco Herculis EBS meeting in July.
After being the first athlete announced last November, Mutaz Barshim kept his status as reigning World Champion to win the high jump ahead of his compatriots, and set the best world performance of the year with a jump of 2m40. Meanwhile, 800m Olympic and World Champion Caster Semenya triumphed at the top distance, beating South Africa’s 1500m record with 3:59.92, also the best performance of the year.
Freshly crowned world champion in pole vault, Sandi Morris will come to Monaco after breaking the Doha meeting record with 4m84. Holder of the record of the Diamond League with 5m00 during the final in Brussels in 2016, Morris will challenge the world champion Katerina Stefanidi already announced last November.
Finally, the winners of the sprint races in Qatar will be looking for valuable points in the finals race in Zurich and Brussels. Marie-José Ta Lou will return to the place of her victory last year on 200m, this time on 100m and as a world leader thanks to her victory in Doha in 10.85. Vice World Champion 100m and 200m last summer in London, Ta Lou will be keen to defend her Herculis EBS title.
Noah Lyles, meanwhile, will come for the first time to Monaco. Winner of the Diamond League in 2017 thanks to his victory in Brussels, he will arrive in the Principality after breaking the Doha meeting record and setting a new personal best in 19.83.
Ben and Alice Rolfe at the 2017 Monaco No Finish Line.
The Rolfe family, known in Monaco for their sporty fundraising adventures – from No Finish Line to Marathon des Sables – has set yet another ambitious dad-daughter challenge to raise awareness for diabetes.
Monaco readers will recall that in April of this year, Ben and his eldest daughter, Emily, completed the 250 km Sahara Desert race over five days. The 16-year-old became the youngest person to finish the “Toughest Footrace on Earth”, and helped to raise money for diabetes.
Ben has been competing in ultra-distance races for several years, including the prestigious 160 km Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. More recently, the Monaco-resident did the local 130 km Cro Magnon Trail from Limone Piemonte to Cap d’Ail – aller-retour for a total of 260 km – to raise money for Diabetes UK, because “they were there for us when Alice was diagnosed”.
To date, Ben, who was a self-professed “coach potato” less than a decage ago, has raised over €100,000 for various different causes through the JustGiving website.
“I wanted to prove to my daughter, that even though she had a life-changing – and potentially life-threatening – condition, that she could do anything she wanted if she put her mind to it,” the father of three girls explained at the time.
The condition is Type 1 diabetes, which his daughter Alice was diagnosed with in 2013, at the age of 11, by a finger prick test.
Living with diabetes “Managing Type 1 diabetes is a 24/7 job. There are no holidays,” describes Ben, who along with his wife Sally, has been intensely involved with the management of Alice’s disease since her diagnosis. They get up to check her blood in the night and liaise with her during the day.
“Everyone needs carbohydrates for their body to function but Alice’s body does not produce the insulin required to use those carbs, so that has to be introduced externally.
“It’s not just a question of managing how many carbs she eats, but calculating how many carbs she is ingesting, and then putting in enough insulin to deal with those carbs.”
As Ben says, some people suggest she could just cut out carbs. “If she did, she would die.”
Alice needs to check her blood sugar levels with a finger prick, but the calculation also includes how much exercise she has done or is about to do. And because insulin is a hormone, it can be affected by the body’s other hormones. So it is never an exact science.
“Alice is also a growing teenager and that affects her calculations. And there’s a constant pressure of knowing that getting it wrong can mean a hypo – low blood sugar – which can affect a diabetic’s ability to function, much the same way as drinking too much alcohol, and then the associated ‘hangover’, once they hypo has been treated by eating something.
If blood sugar levels fall too much then the diabetic can pass out or worse. And then if the blood sugar level goes too high, that too can have serious ramifications such as blindness, amputations and death, if not treated in time with insulin.”
Climb every mountain
Alice, a student at Lycée Albert 1er who will be 16 in May (and has a younger sister Isabelle, 12), is now up for her own dad-daughter challenge, “partly because of the sibling rivalry with Emily but also because she is my daughter,” Ben adds.
“We were thinking of a challenge other than the Marathon des Sables and as Kilimanjaro is something I’ve always wanted to do, the target was set for this June.”
Trekking up Africa’s highest peak over five days from base camp with a hormonal 16-year-old girl might be a “little tricky”, but it’s the mood swings that can make up part of living with diabetes which concern Ben the most.
“While both of us have experience at altitude, skiing and trekking, we don’t know how climbing to nearly 6,000 metres will affect us, or Alice’s diabetes’ treatment. We also need to work on hypo treatments that are light enough to carry for a week but effective enough as I think that the constant activity and altitude will probably exacerbate her carb usage and make the insulin more efficient.
“Ketones are also a worry. Your body burns fat to use and produce ketones whenever glucose sources are low or depleted, which happens especially during physical exercise. Of course, Alice cannot deal with that internally, so her ketone levels will have to be carefully monitored during the trek.”
A few years ago, Ben was in hospital, about to have an operation, when Alice rang him from Outward Bound in the UK’s Lake District because her ketones level was too high, which was a result of the physical exercise she was doing.
“Between us, we had to calculate how much extra insulin she needed to inject in order to manage the ketones before it got out of hand and started to threaten her health.
“You can never really switch off with diabetes, although nowadays Alice’s manages it much more independently and just calls in help when she reaches DEFCON 1 levels!”
Ben and Alice Rolfe leave for Kilimanjaro via Ethiopia on June 21. Support their climb for Diabetes UK with a donation through JustGiving. Article first published February 24, 2018.
Continuing his trip to North America, after visiting a number of Canadian cities, Prince Albert travelled on Wednesday, May 9, to Philadelphia, the birthplace of his mother, Princess Grace.
On Wednesday morning, Prince Albert was the special guest of the prestigious Thomas Jefferson University where he was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in “Human Letters” in recognition of his work on environmental issues, especially through his Foundation, and for his support for theatre, dance and film through the work of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA.
Photo: F. Nebinger/Palais Princier de Monaco
Prince Albert delivered a speech to nearly two thousand people, including 650 new graduates of the University and their families, stressing the importance of the behaviour of each one of us to better defend our planet.
The Thomas Jefferson University is a university founded in 1824. It specialises in the sciences of medicine and the different fields of health.
Laurent Puons, CEO of the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, announced the recipient of its Crystal Nymph Award and unveiled the names of jury members for the Fiction and News categories of this year’s 58th Awards. He also revealed an extensive line-up of premiere screenings and exclusive celebrations taking place during the globally renowned event.
At a presentation in Monaco on Wednesday, March 9, Puons confirmed that acclaimed Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actress Mariska Hargitay will receive the Festival’s Crystal Nymph Award. The Award, which recognises a stellar body of work by a major international actor or actress, will be presented by Prince Albert, Honorary President of the Festival, as part of the Opening Ceremony on June 15.
The News Jury panel, which will be led by Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford, includes Ulysse Gosset, international editorialist for BFM-TV, and Susan Ormiston, senior correspondent for CBC News.
Also joining the panel is José Antonio Guardiola, editor and producer for TVE, Theo Koll, head of ZDF’s Paris office, and director and producer Hyun-Mo Jung.
Following the Opening Ceremony, the Festival will play host to the Global Premiere
Opening Screening of Amazon Prime Original series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. The series is a reinvention with a modern sensibility of the unexpected Tom Clancy hero played by John Krasinski, who also serves as an Executive Producer. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan also stars Wendell Pierce and is created by Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland who also serve as Co-Showrunners and Executive Producers. Amazon will debut the global series, from Paramount Television and Skydance Television, August 31 on Prime Video.
The five-day event will culminate with the Golden Nymph Awards Ceremony.
For their last conference of the season at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels on May 5, the Grandes Conférences Catholiques offered the podium to Prince Albert, to set out his and his Foundation’s commitment to the environment, in the context of an address entitled “Air, Sea and Land: This century’s crucial challenges”.
HSH Prince Albert spoke alongside Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Professor at UCL, member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and former Vice-President of the GIEC, and Olivier de Schutter, also a UCL professor, member of the United Nations Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and former special reporter to the United Nations on the right to food.
Professor van Ypersele’s presentation concerned the climate while Professor de Schutter focused on sustainable agriculture and food. For his part, Prince Albert spoke of the sea, an issue that plays a key role in his actions. Reiterating the universal nature of the system constituted by the air, the sea and the land, His Serene Highness pointed out the profound effect human activities have had on that system, leading to severe imbalances.
After reminding the conference of the principal threats to the world’s seas – over-exploitation of marine resources, pollution and severe deregulation of marine balance – the Prince welcomed the dynamism of the international institutions that had included ocean preservation in their action plans, but also stressed the need to continue mobilisation efforts and even accelerate them “because time is pressing and the target fixed by the international community in Aichi to reach 10 percent of all MPAs by 2020 will in all likelihood not be achieved as currently we have only achieved about seven percent.”
The Sovereign Prince concluded with the words: “Through our seas, it is our own lives which we must save.”
Galerie Birch will mark this weekend’s Grand Prix de Monaco Historique with an evocative exhibition featuring vintage cars from the Golden Age of Americana.
Just as the streets of Monaco will be transformed into a homage to the beauty and speed of vintage automobiles, so will the walls of Galerie Birch in this celebratory Pop Art Pop-up Exhibition, which opens on Friday May 11.
Founder of Galerie Birch, Børge Birch, had a special place in his heart for the Grand Prix de Monaco, which he attended on a number of occasions from his home in Denmark. Now his daughter, Anette, owner of Galerie Birch Monaco, has decided to honour the event with a pop-up exhibition featuring artworks by Danish artist Ole Ziger.
Ziger has a love of all things vintage, including cars. His style has a distinct sense of style and humour, often placing well-known cartoon figures in unexpected settings; Donald Duck lost in Times Square or Betty Boop on the backseat of a Harley Davidson. Ziger’s paintings are a celebration of the golden age of Americana and advertising with a twist of pop culture.
The exhibition at 17 rue Basse in Monaco-Ville will open on Friday at 11am.
