THE CANADIAN PRESS
BEIJING — Tim Berrett couldn’t fathom another four years. He was more concerned with making it another four steps.
The Edmonton athlete raced to 38th place in the men’s 50-kilometre race walk Friday, in his fifth Olympic appearance.
Berrett crossed the finish line in the Bird’s Nest stadium in four hours eight minutes 18 seconds, his legs nearly buckling as he limped off the track.
"Everything (hurts), I’m just totally, absolutely drained," Berrett said after making a slow and painful walk through the mixed zone where athletes stop to speak with reporters.
Alex Schwazer of Italy won the gold in an Olympic record time of 3:37.09, Jared Tallent of Australia took the silver in 3:39.27, while Russia’s Denis Nizhegorodov captured the bronze in 3:40.14.
Several athletes dropped out of the gruelling race, held under sunny skies in 26 C heat. Some collapsed after crossing the finish line, others vomited on the track.
"It just drains everything out of you, physically I can hardly walk another step, and then they make us go up the stairs and back down in the mixed zone here, that’s the cruellest thing," added Berrett, holding onto a barrier for dear life as he spoke. "I threw up a couple of times when I was coming through the mixed zone here. Emotionally as well, you’re just drained. It’s just hard to describe what your body and your mind goes through when you finish this event."
When a reporter asked why he does it, Berrett replied: "At times like this, I wonder.
"To try to do as well as you can and see what you can push your mind and your body through, and that’s why I’ve been doing it for so many years. Some days it happens and some days it doesn’t happen at all, and some days it’s kind of in between, and today was one of those."
The 43-year-old Berrett, a father of two kids who owns his own sport management consulting firm, was the second oldest walker in the race. Hungary’s Zoltan Czukor was the oldest at 45.
Berrett has competed in nine world championships, more than any other track and field athlete in the world, and has collected 13 national titles over numerous distances.
He met his wife Tara, a former national team field hockey player, on a bus at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
Asked if he could see himself continuing on for another four years, Berrett said, "I doubt it."
If it was his last Games appearance, Berrett couldn’t soak in much of the Olympic atmosphere when he walked into the stadium
"I was just so drained, it was just hard to focus on that end of things, I was just focused on the finish line," he said. "I had someone who was catching me a little bit at the end, and so I couldn’t really enjoy it as much as I would have liked so it was just focusing on holding it together until the finish line."
Before limping away to an awaiting Canadian team doctor, Berrett said it would take him up to two months before he felt normal again after Friday’s race.
The race walk was held on a two-kilometre loop that snaked around the Olympic Green plaza with the Beijing National Stadium — the 91,000-seat stadium worth US$500 million otherwise known as the Bird’s Nest — as the backdrop. But the course had caused some controversy earlier in the Games with athletes complaining about the hard surface.
Organizers laid a grey synthetic surface over the granite slabs of the plaza, that was four metres wide and four millimetres thick.
