Ontario PM ‘outruns’ Milkha

After a brief warmup session Milkha Singh offered tips on running to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

This was one race that Milkha Singh was delighted to suggest and happier still to lose when he ran with the premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne on the bank of the Sukhna Lake on Wednesday.

The race was set up when the Flying Sikh visited Toronto last year and met PM Wynne at the Para PanAm Games which she was overseeing, a statement said. Wynne was keen to meet with the legendary runner whose exploits she used to follow as an athlete, and had set a regional record in the 400m — Milkha’s pet event — while still in school.

After a brief warmup session Milkha Singh offered tips on running to Premier Wynne, they ran a pre determined course of a km at a comfortable pace surrounded by regular morning walkers and joggers at Sukhna Lake. Both hardly broke ia sweat and cheered by the onlookers completed the run with Wynne showing she was still track ready.

“I was very impressed with Premier Wynne’s understanding of athletics and it’s only after we started talking that I realised what a fine athlete she was. I would like to call our run today a ‘friendship run’ which is a result of that meeting in Toronto. And I will be delighted to see if we can extend this to some form of an understanding to help future athletes from India benefit from Canadian technology and support,” said Milkha after the run.