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News02 Feb 2002


Colin Jackson, Christian Malcolm and Catherine Murphy prepare for battle on home territory

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Colin Jackson, Christian Malcolm and Catherine Murphy prepare for battle on home territory
Christ Turner for the IAAF

1 February 2002 – Cardiff - The AAA’s Indoor Championships will, for the first time in their history, be held outside England, when the Norwich Union Indoor Trials & AAA Championships take place in the Principality of Wales, at Cardiff’s National Indoor Athletics Centre on the 2nd and 3rd February.

The championships, at which GBR team selection for the forthcoming European Indoor championships in Vienna is up for grabs, have been moved from their regular home in Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena, which is preparing to hold a Davis Cup Tennis tie between Britain and Sweden.

Britain is not endowed with many indoor 200m track facilities but what it lacks in number, it makes up for in quality and, despite complaints about the tightness of the bends by some 200m and 400m runners, Cardiff should provide a suitable venue for the championships.

The closest fought contest of the weekend should come in the men’s 60 metres, where Cardiff’s Christian Malcolm, Olympic 200m 5th placer and reigning European indoor 200m champion, will take on a small crop of world class British sprinters.

Birmingham’s Mark Lewis Francis, World junior 100m champion and World senior indoor 60m bronze medallist, has had a lightning start to the new year. Lewis Francis’ best of the season, a 6.56 second run came in Birmingham last weekend, indicating that Malcolm will need all the encouragement the local spectators can muster, if he is to stand any chance of winning the championship dash on home territory.

City of Bath born athlete Jason Gardener, who the promoters are billing as the “forgotten man of British sprinting”, could spring a surprise on both Malcolm and Lewis Francis. Gardener, the current European indoor 60m champion, has had his career blighted by niggling back injuries since that victory in Ghent two years ago, but is now fit and hopes to recapture the form, which also took him to the 1999 World indoor championship 60m bronze medal in Maebashi.

In the men’s 60m sprint hurdles, Colin Jackson, the World indoor record holder, who like Malcolm was born in Wales, is likely to be another crowd pleaser. Jackson, who will turn 35 years old in February, has shown some good early season form. In Karlsruhe, on the 25th January, he blasted away from a world class field with a fine 7.48 second run, and two days later in Dortmund, finished second (7.57 sec) behind Russia’s Yevgeniy Pechonkin (7.52 sec).

The star of the women’s programme should be Ashia Hansen, the World indoor triple jump record holder, whose 14.44m winning leap at the same Dortmund meeting, her best ever season opener, shows she may be returning to the fitness which drove her to a world record breaking win (15.16m) at the 1998 European indoor championships, and in the following season to the World Indoor championship gold.

The undoubted star of last year’s AAA’s championships was Catherine Murphy, who became the first women ever to claim a 200m and 400m double in the same year. She will run only the longer distance in Cardiff and will start as the clear favourite to retain her 400m title. Murphy, who holds the Welsh indoor records for both 200m and 400m, is in hot form and, buoyed on by the Welsh spectators, will have her sights set on Merlene Ottey’s championship best of 52.21 secs.

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