Flashes of Panic

My preview of Saturday’s Boston Indoor Games is posted on IAAF.org this morning. It was probably the easiest time I’ve ever had writing this meet preview (I hate previews but they force me to study a little) and while I did have one gaffe, I made up for it elsewhere.

See, I thought Carolina Klüft won the 2006 World Indoor Championship in the pentathlon; turns out she didn’t even compete in that event, but won back in ‘03 or ‘04. Fortunately my editor caught that one before it went up, and fixed it for me.

But when I was checking some other details with the meet’s media coordinator, I mentioned something about Klüft being the “fourth World Champion.” She responded that she didn’t know what I meant by that. Well, there’s four winners from Osaka competing: Reese Hoffa in the shot, Meseret Defar (the 5,000m champion) in the two-mile, Tirunesh Dibaba (10,000m) in the 3,000m, and Klüft (heptathlon) in the long jump. Apparently this point hadn’t even occurred to them at the press office.

I telegraphed this in the preview, but I’ll come right out and predict it here: Defar’s going to take down the world best in the two-mile. (N.B. the IAAF doesn’t maintain “World Records” for that event, so it’s only a “World Best”.) Her 3,000m time is nearly a minute faster, and the two-mile is only a lap and a few strides longer; she’ll “only” need 35s laps to beat the record, so she can run as much as a second per lap slower than her 3,000m best and still take it down.

And given that the “best” is still held by an athlete who left the sport disgraced under a drug cloud, nobody will be sorry to see the name rewritten.

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