ECB chairman Richard Thompson needs to determine a brand new high-profile charity occasion on the cricket calendar after strolling 100 laps of Lord’s – the equal of 31 miles – to boost cash for the Alzheimer’s Society.
Thompson, who misplaced each dad and mom to dementia – together with his mom as lately as three weeks in the past – intends to problem his counterparts at different nationwide boards to do the stroll themselves, and has visions of extending the occasion to venues reminiscent of Australia’s MCG and Barbados’s Kensington Oval.
‘It occurred to me {that a} hundred at Lord’s is the head for any batsman to attain, so might we do 100 laps?’ he instructed Each day Mail Sport, as he and 99 others walked anti-clockwise spherical cricket’s most well-known floor.
‘It’s clearly captured folks’s creativeness, and we’ve already raised £300,000, which is £50,000 over the place we thought we’d get.
‘The aim behind that is to make this an annual occasion at Lord’s – and perhaps to make it virtually the ice-bucket-challenge precept. So I’m going to problem the chair of Cricket Australia or the chair of Cricket West Indies: you come to Lord’s, I come to Bridgetown, and we get 100 folks to do it there, after which this turns into a extra world annual occasion.’
ECB chairman Richard Thompson needs to determine a brand new high-profile charity occasion on the cricket calendar after strolling 100 laps of Lord’s to boost cash for the Alzheimer’s Society
Dementia and Alzheimer’s illness are the largest killers within the UK, accounting for over 76,000 deaths yearly. And whereas medication can mitigate signs, there stays no treatment.
‘Making an attempt to get a analysis is a nightmare,’ mentioned Thompson, who can be the founder and chair of Sport United Towards Dementia. ‘In case you might be identified early, there’s a drug that slows down onset and so provides you a high quality of life you may in any other case not have.
‘However there are too many individuals within the nation that don’t need to know they’ve obtained it. I believe there’s nonetheless a stigma hooked up to it, the place folks generally don’t need to admit that their mother or father or cherished one is affected by this, as a result of their decline might be very noticeable.’
