For any athlete, the unequivocal backing of the head of a national body charged with overseeing the sport to which you have dedicated your life is one of those things surely taken for granted: when King Canute had a hard time of it holding back the waves, a spin doctor with the gyrating power of the planets would have been required to assure the monarch’s subjects that all would come good in the return leg - perhaps a rematch staged under floodlights. It must then have come as some surprise to Spain’s athletes when the country’s Athletics Federation (RFEA) president, José María Odriozola, laid into his charges who had competed at the 2010 European Championships in Barcelona. Odriozola’s … [Read more...] about Spanish athletes drop the baton ahead of 2012