World Indoors: An OK for Team UK.

Across the water from the glitz and glamour of the Bahrain Grand Prix, a strong team of UK athletes was competing in the futuristically named Aspire Dome, Doha, Qatar, in the 13th IAAF World Indoor Championships, full results from which can be found here.

Indoor athletics has always been hard to promote effectively, I suspect mainly because track and field is instinctively such a primal outdoors activity that the notion of holding it indoors is a touch ridiculous. The status of these championships is thus not particularly high and for many competitors it is more of a stepping stone than an end in itself. Witness for one the absence of the two dominant figures in men’s athletics, Usain Bolt and Kenenisa Bekele.

Everything indoors is compressed: the track is 200m rather than 400m; the main sprinting event is the 60m (on a stretch inside the oval); the sprint hurdles are also over 60m; the longest event is the 3000m; decathletes become heptathletes, who, in turn, become pentathletes. As for the field events, the jumps are all as per outdoors (+ pole vault) but, for obvious reasons, only the shot put is retained of the throwing events.

Dwain Chambers put in an excellent performance to secure the 60m title, his winning time of 6.48s a world fastest this year. The shorter distance is more suited to the smaller power based athletes, who can blast out of the blocks and get to the drive phase quicker; at 5’11 Chambers is no dwarf but compared to the 6’6 frame of Bolt, for instance, he’s not big either. Chambers’ redemption from his performance-enhancing drugs past is almost complete and deservedly so because he’s put in a lot of work since then. One can barely imagine the stresses that a world class sprinter must face, trying to keep it together whilst striving to lose those all-important hundredths of a second; adopting an absolutist “one strike and out” stance, as many advocate, is to ride roughshod over human psychology – Chambers’ two year ban was the appropriate punitive measure to my mind.

The UK’s second gold predictably came from Jessica ‘Tadpole’ Ennis (an affectionate moniker, one assumes!) in the pentathlon, who built on her magnificent World Championship gold last summer, and fended off main rival, US athlete Hyleas Fountain, who had been absent in Berlin. Such is her calibre that her marks of 8.04s in the hurdles, 1.90m in the high jump and 6.44m in the long jump would have all been on the cusp of qualification for the finals in the individual events. The shot put is inevitably the weak link given her small stature but a robust 2.12s 800m was sufficient for a championship record and to put her fourth on the all-time list.

The third individual medallist was team captain Jenny Meadows in the 800m, who bettered her Berlin bronze with a superb silver here, breaking the national record in the process (1.58:43). Watching the athletes negotiate the tighter ellipse is slightly comical, you can’t help but think of greyhounds, speed skaters and the like – there’s an almost cruel ‘Running Man’ sci-fi element to it. Any added excitement brought about by the more angular claustrophobic conditions is however balanced by the fact that the races tend to turn into single-file processions; you can’t afford to run abreast because you would have to cover so much more ground. Meadows got her tactics spot on. Last year, she was a reserved ‘pack’ runner, who relied on her 400m speed to come on strong in the home straight – no good doing that here, so she kept to the fore from the start, taking over the lead from the American Johnson on the second lap and only the classy Russian athlete Mariya Savinova managed to overhaul her at the end.

The UK’s men’s 4x400m team also ‘medalled’, albeit their bronze came largely courtesy of Caribbean calamity, as both the Barbados and Jamaica teams pulled hamstrings on their second legs.

The big disappointments were the failures to even qualify for the final by Kate Dennison in the pole vault and Rutherford / Tomlinson in the long jump. The more nebulous negative was that no outsider put in an exceptional eye-catching effort. 

The US topped the medal table and had a candidate for the most impressive performer in the shape of wily Kenyan ex-pat Bernard Lagat, who bagged the 3000m at the age of 35, not so old in marathon terms but positively Methuselah for hard-core track middle-distance. There was a sense of déjà vu, when, with 400m to go it was him and Bekele at the front, except this time, unlike at the 5000m final in Berlin, it was Kenenisa’s younger brother Tariku, and he simply couldn’t match Lagat’s basic 1500m speed (his PB for the 1500m is 3.26:34, second only to Hicham El Guerrouj). Lagat’s joy was writ large on his face as he cruised down the home straight – that’s why he’s still pumping out those miles in training.

Other notable world track performances were super-cool Cuban Dayron Robles in the 60m hurdles, whose 7.34s winning time was just 4 hundredths outside Colin Jackson’s world record; LoLo Jones put in an equivalently impressive run in the women’s 60m hurdles, breaking Gail Devers’ US record and a new middle-distance star looks to have emerged as 18 year-old Ethiopian Kalkidan Gezahegne breezed to the women’s 1500m title.

There were also some fine performances in the field. American Brian Clay who, like Fountain, had missed Berlin, asserted himself over compatriot Tree Hardee to take the heptathlon; the rugged Aussie Steve Hooker, whose heroics whilst injured wowed the crowd in Berlin, cleared 6.01m in the pole vault to break Bubka’s championship record; full of youthful vigour, Frenchman Teddy Tamgho propelled himself out to 17.90m in the triple jump for another championship record; Brazilian Fabiane Murer upset Isinbayeva in the women’s pole vault (the latter could only finish fourth) and Belorussian Nadzeya Ostapchuk got another CR with a throw of 20.85m in the women’s shot put.

What can we look forward to this summer?

On the world stage, there are the new Diamond League meetings. The excitement will probably again be centred around Usain Bolt and whether he will stick to the bread and butter of the short sprints or have a go in earnest at the 400m (in a relay leg recently in Jamaica, he clocked 43.58s, suggesting that he is capable of breaking Michael Johnson’s fabulous world record).

On the road, there’s the good old London Marathon on 25th April and elder statesman Haile Gebrselassie has his sights set on a 10k world record when he competes in the BUPA Great Manchester Run on 16th May.

For the Brits, the European Championships in Barcelona in July are the main focus with the anachronistic encumbrance of the Commonwealth Games to follow in October.