Athletics: Kluft the invincible set to rule the world
Friday, 24 August 2007
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"Ladies and gentlemen, it is a hot day," the woman on the public address system announced at the start of proceedings in Nagai Stadium here yesterday. With the mercury at 27 degrees Celsius and the humidity approaching 70 per cent, it was the Japanese equivalent of a statement of the bleedin' obvious. "Please drink a lot, and if you feel uncomfortable please see a doctor," she added. The message was for the benefit of the athletes out on the track, getting ready for what was officially termed a World Championship "warm-up" meeting.
Fortunately, there were no British casualties. Quite the opposite. Watched by a handful of team-mates, coaches, media personnel and track-side officials in an otherwise empty cavern of a stadium, first Joice Maduaka in the women's 100 metres, then Christine Ohuruogu in the women's 400m, and finally Robert Tobin in the men's 400m, laid down winning markers in Great Britain vests – all in season's best times. Whether the British team can survive the oppressive heat of World Championship competition, though, remains to be seen.
The action that matters gets under way tonight at 11pm GMT with the men's marathon, and hopes of British success on the medal front over the next nine days are as slim as they have ever been in the 24-year history of the World Championships.
Still, at least there is a chance of some precious metal in the event that is likely to grip the attention in the opening two days. The improving Jessica Ennis and the Olympic bronze medallist Kelly Sotherton are both likely to play more than bit-part roles as the drama of the heptathlon unfolds.
The withdrawal of Eunice Barber, the 1999 world champion, has boosted their prospects, although their path to the podium may well be blocked by Carolina Kluft, Tatyana Chernova and Lyudimla Blonska, a reinstated drug offender from Ukraine. While British eyes have been focused on the emerging Ennis and the somewhat stalling Sotherton, the wider track and field world has been envisioning the prospect of a compelling duel between the invincible Kluft and the prodigiously talented Chernova.
At 24, Kluft has yet to lose a heptathlon as a senior athlete. Her last defeat stretches back 18 competitions and six years, to the European Cup Combined Events B match at Ried in Austria in July 2001. If she carries out her declared intention to concentrate on the long jump after next year's Olympic Games, the Swede could go through her entire senior heptathlon career unbeaten. Unless Chernova can find a chink in her armour in Osaka or Beijing, that is.
Even if the 19-year-old Russian can mount a serious challenge to the reigning champion, she will confirm her emergence as both an heir to Kluft in the heptathlon and as a major global track and field star in the making.
Winner of the world junior title last year, Chernova boasts the highest points score in the world this year, 6,678. Though she achieved it with wind assistance at Arles in France in June, few in the know doubt the pedigree of a young woman who can hurl a javelin well beyond the 50m mark and whose mother, Lyudmila Chernova, won an Olympic 4x400m relay gold medal in Moscow in 1980.
Not that Chernova junior is shouting the odds about herself. Far from it. "I am not talking about winning a medal here," she said. "Just to be in the same competition as Carolina Kluft is an achievement for me, a dream come true. She has always been my idol."
Fully fit in a major championship for the first time since the Athens Olympics in 2004, Kluft could well be pushed by the deeds of her Russian admirer towards breaking her personal best tally of 7,001 points and also Larisa Nikitina's European record score of 7,007 points. Certainly, from yesterday's evidence, the Nagai track would appear to be conducive to quick times.
Ohuruogu discovered as much, running in only her second 400m race since serving the 12-month suspension she received for missing three drug tests. Her winning time, 50.56sec, raised her to 12th in the world rankings and 10th on the list of athletes entered in the event for the World Championships. For all her obvious delight, the Commonwealth champion remained tight-lipped as she left the track.
Like the majority of the Great British runners, jumpers and throwers who have gathered here in Japan's second city, she remains an outsider in the global contest that is about to begin.
Three to watch in Osaka
Tyson Gay (US, 100m)
Guided from behind bars by coach Lance Brauman, Gay has been threatening to break Asafa Powell's world record, 9.77sec.
Alan Webb (US, 1500m)
The 24-year-old has failed to deliver before but, having broken Steve Scott's 25-year-old US mile record, could finally fulfil promise.
Jeremy Wariner (US, 400m)
In Stockholm three weeks ago the Texan clocked 43.50sec in the 400m. "There's no telling what I can do in Osaka," he said yesterday.
