"The Olympic Kidnap Plot" is a Thunderbirds comic story, first published in the pages of TV21 between issues 173 and 178.
Synopsis[]
Day 5 of the 2068 World Olympic Games sees the marathon take place, which is expected to be a closely fought battle between England's Jim Baldwin and Greece's Tibor Zelgad. What nobody expected however, is for the two finest marathon runners to be brazenly kidnapped from the track by gunpoint and forced to retrieve treasure buried deep under a volcano. Scott, who has been caught up in the whole affair after being sent out to retrieve the runners, bears witness to an insane attempt to run through 5 mile passage through a volcano which fills with lava routinely every fifteen minutes - which has never been run before at that speed, even by the world of 2068...
Characters[]
(in order of appearance)
- Intercontinental video-scan reporter
- Jim Baldwin
- Tibor Zelgad
- Marathon runners
- Jeff Tracy
- Scott Tracy
- Olympic official
- Lavan Morgan
- Darien Stewart (flashback)
- Pirates (flashback)
- Virgil Tracy
IR Equipment Used[]
Trivia[]
- The real record for running 5 miles is at least 22 minutes and 5 seconds, set by Phillimon Hanneck from Zimbabwe in March 1993. Scott, with no apparent running experience, is able to do it mere seconds under 15 minutes.
Cover/Stop Press Tie-Ins[]
Following the abandonment of cover stories at the end of 1967, issue 177 was notably the only TV21 front page for the entirety of 1968 to dedicate itself to a story in the magazine other than the first page of the Captain Scarlet comic strip.
