my sister kindly made a portrait of me that won't tell you much but that I'm a girl. But what can we do, I can't put a picture, I want to preserve the peace I live in, once my site has become too famous (I must live in hope... no, at the moment to be honest, I have no idea about the number of people I can attract with a site on this subject).

I'm going to tell you a bit more about me so that you aren't left hanging. My name is Carole Fuchs, I'm 23 years old and my English is not perfect (be indulgent) as I'm French. I've been living in Paris suburbs for a few months for my studies but I come from Strabourg, close to the German border. I first studied international relations at Strasbourg's Institute of Political Studies. Studies which led me to learn juggling for a year in England at university of Sussex (and some courses in the department of African and Asian studies incidentally too). Then I decided I wanted to acquire some technical skills and I'm now studying information science.

I've not even started talking about athletics. I was almost born on a stadium, so I started training very early in my life and had a career nobody will remember about (and that's fine). You may not see me compete anymore, I just jog as my back does'nt let me in peace and I can' t train for a month without getting injured. On one side, it's better for you as the less I run, the more I spend time on my computer. However I'm still regularly present on tracks as it's not possible to leave a field where I've got so many friends. I couldn't be a coach because I've no eye for technique. I then tried to discover the field of journalism through an internship in the French company, Polymedias (bookshop 'la Mémoire du Sport', newsletter 'la Lettre de l'athlétisme') which is run by Mr. Yves Pinaud, the specialist in African Athletics (he publishes the African top-100 list for each event in his annual 'African Athletics'). I got interested in the question after realising a few tasks for him.

I decided to make a website this winter because I was getting bored at university and it was a good practical work related to my lessons (now I can tell you, I don't have much time left to be bored). The subject needed to be linked with athletics, but I didn't want to choose French athletics as there are already many good ones and then it's difficult to be original. Then I saw something could be done at the area level and Africa in particular. There seems to be a lot of information available but it is to scattered for people to enjoy it. So I wanted to create a place to gather all those data which will also become I hope a gathering place for athletes and fans of the sport.

The site doesn't present 'fashionable' graphics and may seem basic sometimes but I wanted to gain something from the project so I prefered to learn HTML rather than use any software. Anyway I want content to be more important than graphics and prefer to have light pages that can be downloaded easily from anywhere. I could thus discover the subtleties of different navigators that never work the same way (that'd be too easy). I think the site is best viewed with Internet Explorer, there may be more bugs with Netscape.

I hope you'll enjoy my work. I'm waiting for your feedback. Contact. I thank all my friends who supported me for the site. It will be developped progressively, in particular the magazine part that may before my exams are over, at the end of June I don't think I will update it everyday (I want to keep some free time). The future, it 'll depend on the job I'll find once my studies are over

PS: For people who know me (and those who don't too), I have other centres of interest in my life. such as circus (juggling), comic strip (mostly French-speaking, sorry Brits and American you cannot understand, this art does'nt really exist in your place), travelling, international relations, foreign languages, new technologies, my friends... but it'd be too long to talk about it now.