Old Olympic hurdler banned from escalators

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

An 80-year-old former Olympic Pommy hurdler has been banned from running the wrong way up moving escalators.

Peter Hildreth, a grandfather of five and three-time Olympian was read the riot act by a Surrey department store manager for trying to recreate his old training program from the 1950s.

Hildreth used to run up the escalators in the London Underground once a week when he wasn't on the track or in the gym.

"I started doing it last month because I was turning 80," Hildreth told London's The Daily Mail. "People did not see me do it to start with; I must have done it three or four times."

He was also caught running up the wrong way to the top of the escalator in the Elphicks women's underwear department.

Hildreth could probably still make the British athletic Olympic team due to their lack of gold medals in recent years.

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User comments

Maybe we should have a new "modern" Olympiad with elevator sprinting, train surfing and mobile text messaging. Fortunately Lucozade is not a performance enhancing substance I assume the escalator was operating at the time?

I'm too quick to get caught running up the wrong way of the escalators in the womans underwear department... But I'm not quite 80 yet.

Let the poor *** run, anyone who can run at that age and not break a hip and have it fly up inside them should be allowed to run anywhere he wants. Looking at the security at most shops they are probably *** that he can outrun them on the flat or up the escalators.

If an 80 year old pom can make it the wrong way up an escalator, why cant the rest of the country play sport? maybe the cricket team should bring back, Gooch, Gatting, Atherton, possibly even Tuffnel even he would be a star in this years pommy team!!!!!

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