Andrew Howe's 8.25 season opener in Turin (© Lorenzo Sampaolo)
Every meeting benefits from the presence of a local hero, and in European indoor and outdoor Long Jump champion Andrew Howe, this Friday’s - ‘Golden Gala Kinder+Sport’ meeting (13 July 2007) in Rome, Italy, the third stage of the IAAF Golden League 2007, has a real nugget of gold with which to draw in the crowds and set the evening’s atmosphere on a high.
Andrew Howe, 22, may have come third at last year’s Golden Gala but he did it in great fashion by leaping to a personal best of 8.41m, a notable precursor to his impressive victory at the continental championships later that summer.
Just two centimetres below the Italian record which has been held by Giovanni Evangelisti since 1987, Howe’s performance in Rome’s Olympic stadium came about in a high powered confrontation with the world’s best jumper last year, Panama’s Irving Saladino.
Saladino jumped 8.45 beating the 8.43 national record leap of Ghana’s Ignisious Gaisah which secured second place, with Howe just two further centimetres back in third.
Gaisah, the World Indoor champion, returns to do battle again this Friday but with an 8.08m season’s best is not yet in top gear, and unfortunately, due to his preparations for the Pan-American Games, Saladino will miss this year’s meet.
However, life is still going to be difficult for Howe, who set the Italian indoor record of 8.30m when winning the European indoor crown this winter, as the organisers in Rome have lined-up much of the world’s elite to challenge him.
If he has got over the injury problems experienced in Athens last week - a competition won by Howe with 8.17m - then Louis Tsatoumas of Greece, who with 8.66 metres is currently the furthest jumper in the world of the year, will be his main threat.
Dwight Phillips, the reigning World and Olympic Champion, who was fourth in Rome last year, will also be a major threat. The 29-year-old won the recent US Champs with his season’s (wind legal) best of 8.30m.
Another man firing-up well again this season is Jamaican veteran James Beckford, who with an 8.37m victory in Warsaw last month is the third farthest jumper in the world this year.
2002 European champion Olexiy Lukashevych who won the Ukrainian champs last week with an 8.02m leap, Robert Crowther, the World Junior champion from Australia, and the South African Godfrey Mokoena, the African silver medallist, who was also runner-up to Howe when the Italian took his World Junior title in Grosseto in 2004, are also among those listed start in Rome.
Chris Turner for the IAAF
