Caster Semenya

Mokgadi Caster Semenya Bronze OIB (born 7 January 1991) is a South African middle-distance runner and world champion. Semenya won gold in the women's 800 metres at the 2009 World Championships with a time of 1:55.45 in the final. Semenya also won silver medals at the 2011 World Championships and the 2012 Summer Olympics, both in the 800 metres.

Following her victory at the 2009 World Championships, it was announced that she had been subjected to gender testing. She was withdrawn from international competition until 6 July 2010 when the IAAF cleared her to return to competition. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman included Semenya in a list of "50 People That Matter 2010".

Early life and education

Semenya was born in Ga-Masehlong, a village in South Africa near Polokwane (back then called Pietersburg), and grew up in the village of Fairlie, "deep in South Africa's northern Limpopo province." She has three sisters and a brother, and is said to have been a tomboy as a child.

Caster

A caster (or castor) is an undriven, single, double, or compound wheel that is designed to be mounted to the bottom of a larger object (the "vehicle") so as to enable that object to be easily moved. They are available in various sizes, and are commonly made of rubber, plastic, nylon, aluminum, or stainless steel.

Casters are found in numerous applications, including shopping carts, office chairs, and material handling equipment. High capacity, heavy duty casters are used in many industrial applications, such as platform trucks, carts, assemblies, and tow lines in plants. Generally, casters operate well on smooth and flat surfaces.

Types

Casters may be fixed to roll along a straight line path, or mounted on a pivot or pintle such that the wheel will automatically align itself to the direction of travel.

Rigid casters

A basic, rigid caster consists of a wheel mounted to a stationary fork. The orientation of the fork, which is fixed relative to the vehicle, is determined when the caster is mounted to the vehicle. An example of this is the wheels found at the rear of a shopping cart in North America. Rigid casters tend to restrict vehicle motion so that the vehicle travels along a straight line.

2017 World Championships in Athletics

The 16th World Championships in Athletics are scheduled to be held in 2017 in London, United Kingdom. London was officially awarded the Championships by the IAAF, in Monaco on 11 November 2011.

Bidding process

When the seeking deadline passed on 1 September 2011, two candidate cities (London and Doha) had confirmed their candidatures. Barcelona, which investigated a bid, withdrew citing a lack of support from the local population and financial difficulties. IAAF Evaluation Commission will evaluate the bids of the two cities. The commission visited London on 2 October before departing for Doha on 4 October and staying there until 6 October with the final announcement of the winner on 11 November 2011. On 11 November 2011, the winner was officially announced as London.

Doha

On 5 September 2011 Doha launched its marketing bid for the 2017 World Championships. The slogan of the bid was "The RIGHT PARTNER for a stronger World Championships." The bid was led by Abdullah Al Zaini and Aphrodite Moschoudi. Moschoudi successfully led Qatar's bid for the 2015 Handball World Championships. Doha also brought in Brian Roe, a member of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Technical Committee. The bid was for the championships to be held in the renovated, climate-controlled Khalifa Stadium. The Corniche prominade was to hold the road races, with the committee proposing to hold the marathon at night after the opening ceremony.

World championship

A world championship is generally an international sports competition open to elite competitors from across the world, representing their nations, and winning such an event will be considered the highest or near highest achievement in the sport or contest.

The title is usually awarded through a combination of specific contests or, less commonly, ranking systems (e.g. the ICC Test Championship), or a combination of the two (e.g. World Triathlon Championships in Triathlon). This determines a 'world champion', who or which is commonly considered the best nation, team, individual (or other entity) in the world in a particular field, although the vagaries of sport ensure that the competitor recognised at the best in an event is not always the 'world champion' (see Underdog).

Certain sports do not have a world championship, instead they may organise a world cup competition, or they may organize both. Often, the use of the term cup or championship in this sense is just a choice of words. Some sports have multiple champions because of multiple organizations such as mixed martial arts, boxing and wrestling.

South Africa

South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost sovereign state in Africa. It is bounded on the south by 2,798 kilometers of coastline of southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, on the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and on the east by Mozambique and Swaziland, and surrounding the kingdom of Lesotho. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area, and with close to 53 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere.

South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a wide variety of cultures, languages, and religions. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the constitution's recognition of 11 official languages, which is among the highest number of any country in the world. Two of these languages are of European origin: Afrikaans developed from Dutch and serves as the first language of most white and coloured South Africans; English reflects the legacy of British colonialism, and is commonly used in public and commercial life, though it is fourth-ranked as a spoken first language.