Jeremy Wariner, Allyson Felix and Blanka Vlasic kicked off the countdown to this year’s IAAF World Championships with impressive victories last weekend.
With 100 days to go until the opening ceremony in Berlin, Wariner returned to the scene of his last global triumph at the Osaka Grand Prix and demonstrated just why he’s poised to rediscover the form that until last year made him the most feared one lap runner in the world.
In 2009, the 25-year-old Texan aims to prove that his defeat at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, though one of the shocks of the track and field programme, was a rare blip in an illustrious career.
Wariner said on the eve of the Osaka race that he hoped “to run low 44 and possibly 43”, and though he wasn’t quite as quick as that on May 9th the manner of his comfortable 44.69sec victory demonstrated he is on track to win his third straight world 400m title this summer.
At the last world championships in the same Nagai stadium two years ago, Wariner consolidated his reputation as the world’s supreme one lap sprinter where, for the third straight global championship, he claimed gold medals in not only the individual 400m but also as a member of the United States 4x400m relay quartet. Wariner was just one of three members of adidas’ squad to record victories last weekend.
Another was Allyson Felix who, like Wariner, will be seeking a hat-trick of world titles in Berlin. The Los Angeles-based sprinter is a 200m specialist having won world titles over the distance in Helsinki and then Osaka but last Friday (May 8) at the Qatar Super Grand Prix in Doha she produced the sort of accomplished performance that hinted she may one day make the step up to the one lap event at championship level.
For now, Felix is adamant her plans are focused on the 200m but in Doha she beat a field with ease that included the Olympic silver medalist. Felix’s winning time was 50.75sec.
Felix’s annus mirabilis was 2007 when she not only retained her world 200m title, doing so by a massive margin, but also clocked lifetime bests in the 100m, 200m and 400m. She won three gold medals in all at the world championships (just the second woman to ever achieve the feat), having been a member of the United States’ victorious relay squads in both the 4x100m and 4x400m finals.
The 2009 indoor season had ended in disappointment for high jumper Blanka Vlasic but in Doha last weekend the Croatian bounced back to her brilliant best. At the same meeting where two years ago she jumped 2.04 metres, she went one centimetre higher and even made one credible attempt at improving the world record.
In common with Wariner and Felix, last year’s Olympic Games saw Vlasic fall agonisingly short of the golden prize, but this weekend she too turned the clock back to her dominant days of 2007. Not only did Vlasic win the world title two years ago but she also posed the greatest threat yet to a world record that has stood for more than two decades - Stefka Kostadinova’s mark of 2.09m was set at the 1987 world championships.
Another adidas athlete starting her Berlin countdown last weekend was heptathlete Jessica Ennis. The Briton who finished fourth in the 2007 world championships was sidelined with a stress fracture last year which forced her to miss the Olympic Games. But at the IAAF Combined Events Challenge in Desenzano del Garda in Italy she improved her lifetime best by 118 points to 6587.
Also in tremendous form this weekend was another adidas athlete anxious to atone for the disappointments of 2009. Yargelis Savigne of Cuba won the women’s world triple jump title in Osaka and then indoor equivalent in Valencia six months later. But she disappointed in Beijing finishing out of the medals. Now though she’s back on top of the world with a remarkable leap of 14.73m into a 1.7m/s wind at a meeting in Fortaleza, Brazil. It is the longest jump in the world this year.
A string of outstanding early-season performances have also come from the women’s Olympic and world shot putt champion, Valerie Vili, who has recorded five of the year’s six longest throws during the New Zealand domestic season.
Also look out this summer for the Jamaican teenager Yohan Blake, coached by Glen Mills and a member of the adidas-funded Racers’ Club, who has already clocked 10.07sec for the 100m.
It promises to be a successful summer for the company’s powerful track and field squad with two other world champions from Osaka preparing to make their first serious competitive forays in the coming weeks.
Tyson Gay and Veronica Campbell-Brown both work under the tutelage of Lance Brauman in Clermont, Florida. Campbell-Brown, the double Olympic 200m champion, will be seeking to retain her world 100m crown this summer having prevailed in Osaka in one of the closest ever sprint finals witnessed in a championship.
Gay is determined that 2009 will be his year for atonement. In the last world championship year Gay had brushed aside all who were put in his way. The highlight of his season came in Osaka where in one of the sport’s most eagerly anticipated head-to-heads of the last decade he overhauled the then world record holder to claim the 100m title. Later the same week Gay added the 200m crown. It was a remarkable double that put him alongside great names like Jesses Owens, Valeri Borzov and Carl Lewis who have all completed sprint doubles at global championships.
The seasonal return of the Cuban hurdler Dayron Robles is also much anticipated. Next month, Robles will celebrate his first anniversary as a world record holder having stunned the athletics world at the Golden Spike meeting in Ostrava, Czech Republic on June 12 2008 by improving the world 110m hurdles record to 12.87sec. Later in the season he went on to claim the Olympic title in Beijing.
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