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Gay news: 'Let's show off a great Briton of whom we should be proud'
Turing also trialled for the Olympic marathon
Call for Alan Turing to be honoured at Olympics
The originator of the successful campaign for an official apology for the fate of Alan Turing, the gay mathematician and second world war codebreaker who committed suicide after being prosecuted for homosexuality, has called for the 2012 Olympics to honour his memory.
Writing in the Guardian, leading British computer programmer John Graham-Cumming noted that Turing was not only a mathematical genius but also an accomplished athlete.
He suggested that the marathon could be named after him because Turing had trialled for the 1948 event, when Britain last hosted the Olympics.
He wrote: "As London shows off what's great about Britain through the Olympic Games, let's show off a great Briton of whom we should be proud."
Alan Turing's work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War was, according to another of the campaigners for an apology, Professor Richard Dawkins, a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill's.
After his prosecution for homosexuality and submission to a form of chemical castration as an alternative to a jail sentence, Turing committed suicide in 1954.
In September 2009, Gordon Brown made a posthumous apology for the treatment Turing received, after a petition on the No10 website had been signed by 30,805 people.
Graham-Cumming addressed those who "may worry about raking over the embers of the dark days of anti-homosexuality laws", writing:
"But there's little need to be concerned: celebrating Turing doesn't mean focusing on just that one aspect of his life.
"it means recognising a mental and physical athlete, a mathematician and marathon runner, and a man to whom we owe so much."
