A 34-YEAR-OLD man has pleaded not guilty to a public order offence after a bottle was thrown on to the track at the start of the men’s Olympic 100m athletics final on Sunday night.
Ashley Gill-Webb, who lives outside Leeds, was arrested after he was struck by a Dutch judo champion standing next to him and who had witnessed his action. He was granted conditional bail yesterday at Stratford Magistrates’ Court, and will face trial at Thames Magistrates’ Court on September 3rd.
Mr Gill-Webb, a spectator, threw a plastic bottle on to the track moments before the final. The incident happened as the world’s fastest men, including eventual champion Usain Bolt of Jamaica, were lining up at the start.
World judo champion Edith Bosch of the Netherlands, who won a bronze medal in the 70kg Olympic event last week, took action. “Just as the gun went off, this man just threw his bottle on the track,” she said yesterday. “And then I responded in the way any other human being would have responded: I pushed him and told him, ‘Man, be normal, have you lost your mind?’”
Bosch, who had been sitting on the second row behind the start line, said the man had been shouting “abusive and disrespectful stuff” at the sprinters during the build-up for the race. After he threw his bottle, the man was taken away by guards, Bosch said.
Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London 2012 organising committee, called the turn of events “poetic justice”.
“I’m not suggesting vigilantism but it was actually poetic justice that they happened to be sitting next to a judo player.”
– (Bloomberg)