ECB chief Richard Thompson calls for a new charity event in the cricket calendar after walking 100 laps of Lord’s to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society
ECB chairman Richard Thompson wants to establish a new high-profile charity event on the cricket calendar after walking 100 laps of Lord’s – the equivalent of 31 miles – to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.
Thompson, who lost both parents to dementia – including his mother as recently as three weeks ago – intends to challenge his counterparts at other national boards to do the walk themselves, and has visions of extending the event to venues such as Australia’s MCG and Barbados’s Kensington Oval.
‘It occurred to me that a hundred at Lord’s is the pinnacle for any batsman to achieve, so could we do 100 laps?’ he told Daily Mail Sport, as he and 99 others walked anti-clockwise round cricket’s most famous ground.
‘It’s clearly captured people’s imagination, and we’ve already raised £300,000, which is £50,000 over where we thought we’d get.
‘The purpose behind this is to make this an annual event at Lord’s – and maybe to make it almost the ice-bucket-challenge principle. So I’m going to challenge 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 people to do it there, and then this becomes a more global annual event.’
ECB chairman Richard Thompson wants to establish a new high-profile charity event on the cricket calendar after walking 100 laps of Lord’s to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society
Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are the biggest killers in the UK, accounting for over 76,000 deaths annually. And while medicine can mitigate symptoms, there remains no cure.
‘Trying to get a diagnosis is a nightmare,’ said Thompson, who is also the founder and chair of Sport United Against Dementia. ‘If you can be diagnosed early, there is a drug that slows down onset and so gives you a quality of life you might otherwise not have.
‘But there are too many people in the country that don’t want to know they’ve got it. I think there’s still a stigma attached to it, where people sometimes don’t want to admit that their parent or loved one is suffering from this, because their decline can be very noticeable.’
