From Down Under to Ey Oop: Visa confusion forces couple to miss out on dream trip to NZ for aweek inyorkshire
Record’s gone in just 9.72 seconds as track ace races into history
Wendy and Robert Thomson’s dream holiday to New Zealand to visit a friend for Christmas was cruelly grounded at the check-in desk before it even began.
The couple were prevented from boarding the flight from Edinburgh to Auckland via Qatar in December, as they didn’t have a new travel visa that had been introduced a few months earlier.
“We were shocked as no one had informed us that we needed a visa,” said Wendy, 60. “We were gobsmacked when we were told that we wouldn’t be allowed to fly so we just had to go home. It was a huge blow. We both felt sick.”
In February last year the couple, from Newtown Saint Boswells, Roxburghshire, paid £2,679 for the flights at the TUI holiday store, Kinnaird Park, Edinburgh.
On top of that they shelled out £800 for a hotel in Auckland, car parking costs, and dog kennelling fees.
“We were so excited at the prospect of being in New Zealand for Christmas,” said Wendy, an admin worker at B&Q. “We were booked to have a few nights in Auckland before going to stay with our friend in Wanganui. Our son Lee had been out there working for the past year and we had arranged to come back to Scotland with him on the same flight.”
However, the couple were gutted when they arrived to the check-in desk at Edinburgh Airport only to be informed they would not be boarding the plane.
“We were told a new tourist visa had been introduced in October and you couldn’t get into the country without one,” said Wendy. “I explained that no one had informed us about this.
We then frantically tried to buy the visas online at the airport. I got mine OK, but Robert’s didn’t come though on time so we were not allowed on the plane. We were upset and furious.” The couple went straight from the airport to the TUI store to make a complaint but had no joy. “They said they couldn’t do anything about it and only tried to sell us more tickets for the next day,” said Wendy.
“It would have cost us another £4,000 for new flights so we had to just forget the whole thing. We ended up going on a trip to a log cabin in Yorkshire for a week instead, but that was hardly comparable to a three-week trip to New Zealand.”
As TUI staff insisted they had done nothing wrong, Wendy felt like she was getting nowhere with her complaint.
“I then discovered that TUI had got the flights via a company called Austravel. This firm informed me they had emailed TUI about the new visas and had advised them to let us know that we needed one before we travelled,” she said.
“But no one from TUI
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Standing in front of a crowd of thousands, his name being cheered from the rafters, it took Usain Bolt just 9.72 seconds to cement his place in history.
On this day 12 years ago, the Jamaican runner set the world record for the 100 metre sprint, outstripping his opponents to reach the finish line during the Reebok Grand Prix meeting at Icahn Stadium, in New York City.
The previous record of 9.74 seconds, held by fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell, had been made just eight months earlier in September, 2007, making those 0.02 seconds the most important of Bolt’s career so far.
The runner-up in the race, American Tyson Gay, who was the reigning world champion in the 100 metres event, was quoted as saying: “It looked like his knees were going past my face” as Bolt’s 6ft 5in frame soared to glory.
Just 21 at the time, it may have been the first photofinish moment that made the record books, but it wouldn’t be Bolt’s last – a feat even more impressive when you consider he had only burst on to the world athletic stage four years previously.
Bolt made his Olympic debut at the Athens Games in 2004, but it wasn’t until the Beijing competition in 2008 that he started to build the reputation that would soon see him described as the world’s fastest man.
During the Beijing Games, Bolt cut a further 0.03 seconds off his personal best, finishing the 100m sprint in just 9.69 seconds to take home the gold medal.
Not content with taking home one medal, Bolt then achieved gold in the 200m, too, eclipsing veteran runner Michael Johnson’s 19.32 second record, which had remained unbeaten since 1996. A third gold medal – and yet another world record
– followed in the 4x100m relay.
With the media now nicknaming him the Lightning Bolt, it would have been easy for the gazelle-like runner to simply maintain his records – after all, no one had even come close to treading on his gold-studded shoes.
But Bolt continued to live up to his reputation as a global superstar, and to this day he still holds the world and Olympic 100m records, as well as eight Olympic gold medals, and 19 Guinness World Records.
After his final Olympic appearance at Rio 2016, the year before his retirement, Bolt said what the sporting world was already thinking: “What else can I do to prove I am the greatest?
“I’m trying to be one of the greatest, to be among Ali and Pele. I have made the sport exciting, I have made people want to see the sport. I have put the sport on a different level.”