Following up on two recent posts...

Wednesday, I posted a story on Steve Roush's resignation as chief of sport performance at the US Olympic Committee, partly as a fallout from last summer's incident involving four cyclists who were forced to write a letter of apology for wearing USOC issued anti-pollution masks at the Beijing airport.

USA Track & Field communications director Jill Geer says that Roush is still on the blue-ribbon panel appointed by CEO Doug Logan to review the organization's high performance division. That group, which includes Federal Way's Aretha Thurmond, is scheduled to present its findings to Logan on January 12th.

In an unrelated note, Home Depot has announced that they will no longer be a sponsor of the US Olympic Committee and discontinue a program that offered jobs and benefits to American athletes, of which Thurmond was once part of.

Home Depot had been a USOC sponsor and provider of the Olympic Job Opportunity Program since 1992. The sponsorship was worth $15 million to $20 million in the four-year period ending in 2008.

The 86 athletes currently in the program will be offered traditional jobs at their current stores. But after March 2, they will no longer receive either full-time benefits or full-time pay for their part-time work, which they performed on flexible schedules depending on their Olympic regimens.

Tuesday's post about my good friend Sean Hartnett apparently has fired up another friend in the business, as photojournalist Patti Stirk from Pennsylvania dropped a note stating that she's about to go to Dubai for Haile Gebreselassie's world record attempt!

Hartnett was the only American to cover the Dubai Marathon last year.