with a two huge matches to get things under way an inspiring story of friendship and hope kevin sinfield has raised millions of pounds for mnd. people living with the disease tell us they can t thank him enough. good morning to you. it s a clear cut tale of two halves this weekend with today largely cloudy and mild and tomorrow chillier but dry with plenty of sunshine. it looks like it was a chilli into next week as well but i will have more of that and the weekend s weather details right later on. it s saturday the fourth of february. our main story us defence chiefs say they have identified a second suspected chinese surveillance balloon, this time above south america. the first balloon was seen yesterday above the state of montana, in the north of the united states. it prompted washington to cancel a high level visit to beijing and accuse the chinese authorities of being irresponsible. china has apologised but insisted it s simply a weather monitoring device which has
kev aims to run seven ultramarathons, one a day for seven days. the route is going to take him from murrayfield in edinburgh to melrose, newcastle, middlesbrough, york, leeds, bradford before he enters the field at old trafford during half time in the men s rugby league world cup final. doddie used to tease me all the time. kevin sinfield has run seven marathons in seven days, 101 miles in 24 hours. now, he is going to run seven ultramarathons in seven days and you ve done the square root of heave ho. thank you for coming out. thank you. so i was pretty much guilted into cycling alongside kevin for the first three or four days of his challenge. i think when we were planning the ultras, i d reached out and said, would you start us off?
meeting doddie weir. that was a really important meeting for all of us, especially for rob. seeing doddie made me see the athlete in us all. he didn t want to lie down and just take it. doddie has certainly got that. live life, keep smiling and wake up every day fighting. the way doddie was attacking mnd, his positivity, his character was just so inspirational. after meeting doddie, i met stephen, another sportsman living with mnd. we all wanted to use our voices to raise awareness of the disease. hopefully, we can keep working together and keep pushing things forward so that we can eventually find that treatment or find a cure.
he mentioned about coming up to murrayfield for this 6:30 start to see kevin away. and he s stubborn as anything. so, lo and behold, he appeared at 6:00 at murrayfield on the dot on that sunday morning. you ok? i didn t think he was going to get out of bed for us! wa nted wanted to stay in bed! it was me that wanted to stay in bed. oh, sorry, catherine. i was so happy, so made up that he was there. i could see doddie trying to attract my attention and i was in this tartan lycra cycling gear. and i got closer and i still couldn t make him out. i was thinking, he might be about to say something inspirational in front of 300 males. got closer again. breathe in, fatty! and thatjust pretty much epitomised doddie. it meant that we got off to a great start, and we knew we were going