DAY 196 - SION TO MARTIGNY: 17.5 MILES (35,000 STEPS)

4 November, 2011

17.5 miles (Total: 1938.8 miles) 35,000 steps (4,179,201 steps)

The end of quite a week. I check out of my hotel in Brig, which has been my base for four days, and drop my rucksack in a locker at Sion station. I set off for Martigny with a spring in my step for a couple of reasons – first, it is the end of a long straight of around 85km down the Rhone Valley from where I turn north again and head up to Lake Geneva and second, because Xuelin Black from my Support Group was coming out and meeting me in Lausanne.

I pounded through the miles, not stopping for a coffee or a drink until I reached Martigny. Such long marches, especially down long straight roads, are hard going quite frankly because they are boring even though   I was in the middle of the Alps with Mount Blanc on one side and the Eiger on the other – I couldn’t see them of course because of the cloud cover.

I spent a large part of the day trying to work out where I would cross the ‘2012 miles’ landmark on my walk, would it be Freiberg or would it be Berne. I get a call from Ana in the Office of the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asking if I could meet the President on Tuesday 15 November in Lausanne. I had been concerned that it might not be possible to meet with Jacques Rogge again (we had met in Zagreb) because the IOC in general and LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) had been lukewarm at best about the walk.

I can understand this; they are great people organising a great event and they tend to get irritated by people who ‘freelance’ or seek to politicise, rather than commercialise the Games. They have a point: I am a politician and I am making a political statement, namely that it is a problem when 193 member states of the UN sign up to a resolution calling for a period of peace and reconciliation and they don’t implement it.

When ten out of fifteen member states on the Security Council decided to intervene in Libya we were able to find £1 billion and mobilise a naval and an air force over a weekend to enforce the resolution. My campaign simply asks the question why we cannot deploy the same resources with the same sense of urgency behind a resolution for peace as we do behind a resolution for war. This makes the Olympic organisers flinch, but the Olympic ideal is not the possession and play thing of a Committee, or a government. It was a dream, an ideal, a gift which was given to humanity by the ancient Greeks and remains available to us all if we choose to accept it.