Road to Torino

“I know you guys all want to do sweet stories about Hallmark and chocolates and butterflies and all that, but I have a pretty unique experience and a pretty unique opportunity here. So I'm going to take advantage of it while I can.

“I have been blessed by competing in the Olympics in speedskating. If I retired yesterday I would have gotten everything in the world from speedskating and from competing in the Olympics. So for me to walk away today with a gold medal is amazing.... And so, I've always felt that if I ever did something big like this I wanted to be prepared to give something back.

"As you know, there's been some media but not a ton [about] the Darfur region of Sudan [where] there has been tens and tens of thousands of people killed. My government has labeled it a genocide, and so I will be donating money specifically to refugees in Chad where there are over 60,000 children who have been displaced from their homes....

"I'm going to be donating the entire $25,000 to the organization [Right to Play] that [Norwegian speed skater] Johann Olav Koss started in 1994. And I'm going to be asking all of the Olympic sponsors that give hundreds of millions of dollars if they will also maybe match my donation to a specific project. And if there's anyone who's going to be reading these articles, if you'd like to check out Right To Play, their web site is righttoplay.com." [update - link fixed]

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• #1 Comment from uyendang72 
  2/13/06 4:43 PM | Permalink

  I believe the Right-to-Play link that you're looking for is really http://righttoplay.wunderman.ca/index.asp