With world record holder Asafa Powell unavailable, the coast appears clear for African champion, Olusoji Fasuba to grab Nigeria’s first World Indoor Championship sprint gold today in Valencia, Spain.
The 60m event of the Valencia Meet is very much open as no one particular sprinter has displayed dominance in the short dash this year. What, however, remains a certainty in the men’s 60m is that a new world champion will emerge.
With champion Leonard Scott of USA missing a chance to defend after pulling up with an injury at the U.S. Championships, the way was paved for newcomer Mike Rodgers to make his mark. Even that is contestable given the form of Fasuba, who is aiming to make up at this Indoor for the flop in Osaka, Japan where no Nigerian runner got anywhere near the medal’s prospect.
Fasuba’s chances appear even more boosted when compared with 22 year-old Rodgers.
The Ekiti-born sprinter, with Jamaican gene from his mother, has been perhaps the most consistent this winter. Fasuba is the only man to have run 6.58 or faster on five occasions. Perhaps boding well for today. His 6.51 chalked up in Valencia on February 9 gives Fasuba head and shoulder edge above Rodgers. With Asafa giving this tournament a miss in order to concentrate on his Beijing Olympic ambition, there is so much to look forward to this evening in the Nigerian camp. Definitely, Fasuba is set to wipe away the memories of his fifth place finish at the last edition two years ago.
In the women’s version of the 60m both Franca Ene Idoko, the Ahmadu Bello University English graduate and Damola Osayomi, an erstwhile undergraduate student at the University of Texas in El Paso (UTEP) are in the form of their lives in only their first season indoor.
Idoko is currently joint first on the IAAF 60m world list for the year courtesy the 7.09 personal-best setting run she put up in Chemnitz, Germany last Friday. Osayomi on the other hand, after a successful a sprints double in Algiers at the 9th All Africa Games last July is ranked the 12th best in the event so far this year following the 7.19 she ran at the Chapel Hill Meeting in North Carolina in the United States of America early last month.
On paper both are guaranteed a final placing while Idoko is tipped to become the first Nigerian woman to win a 60m medal in the history of the Championships as well as the fourth woman to win a medal after the trio of Chioma Ajunwa (long jump silver in 1997), Glory Alozie (60m hurdles in 1999) and Falilat Ogunkoya who won the 400m silver medal inside the Green Dome in Maebashi, Japan also in 1999.
However, to achieve this, the Nigerian duo will have to surmount the opposition exemplified by the presence of American Angela Williams who is determined to finally land her first elusive 60m title after winning silver medals at the 2001 and 2003 World Indoor Championships.
In the quarter mile, 2007 World Championship semi-finalist Christy Ekpukhon Ihunaegbo, who set a new personal of 51.75 in Chemnitz last week, may well be in the throes to win the event, a decade after Sunday Bada did same in the male event in Paris in 1997.
But with two of the fastest runners in that category attending Russia has the clear advantage. The East European nation will be confident of landing a fourth successive World Indoor 400m title as they boast the fastest two women in the field. Olesya Zykina has rolled back the years during this indoor season and leads the world list after her 51.09 clocking to take the Russian title and followed this up victory in the European Indoor Cup in Moscow. Her countrywoman, Natalya Nazarova, had to play second fiddle to Zykina at the national championships but with a season’s best of 51.45 she cannot be dismissed in her history-breaking quest to become the first woman to land three World Indoor 400m titles.
No comments:
Post a Comment