by A. Lennart Julin for IAAF
13 February 2001 - Stockholm - On Thursday the "Energizer Euroseries 2001" will open in Stockholm when the "GE Globen Galan" indoor meet celebrates its 12th edition. Judging from the startlists, this annual athletics extravaganza is set to top all its eleven predecessors. This is said taking into full account that there have been five world records in the last five years and that the meet last year attracted a sell-out crowd in the spherical arena that provides a spectacular landmark in the Swedish capital.
One significant reason is the fact that no less than five Olympic Champions from Sydney will be competing - Noah Ngeny, Anier Garcia, Sergey Klyugin, Jonathan Edwards and Maria Mutola - on Thursday and that none of them is permitted the luxury of an "exhibition" kind of setting as all of them will be facing truly stiff competition.
* Ngeny in the mile race will be up against the likes of in-form Ethiopian Hailu Mekonnen, Spanish double World Championships medallist Reyes Estevez and Briton John Mayock, who is fresh from several weeks of altitude training in Morocco with Hicham El Guerrouj. The latter’s four year old world indoor record could be under severe threat!
* Mutola - who twice has set world indoor records in this meet - will open her indoor season with an exciting match-up with Olympic silver medallist Stephanie Graf. The Austrian actually was a pace-setter de luxe in Mutola’s 1000m world record run two years ago in the Globe Arena. But this time Graf is very much a competitor!
* Edwards will need to display his 17-plus form once more if he wants to keep up his triple jump supremacy, as he is facing the three jumpers finishing immediately behind him in Sydney: Yoel Garcia, Denis Kapustin and Yoelbi Quesada!
* Klyugin is up against five other Sydney finalists in the shape of home favourites Stefan Holm (who won the prestigeous Spala meet last Friday!) and Staffan Strand plus Israeli Konstantin Matusevich and the Canadian duo of Mark Boswell and Kwaku Boateng.
Just like last year the high jump competitions will probably be the events most intensely followed by the knowledgeable and enthusiastic Stockholm crowd, as there won’t be just Stefan and Staffan to cheer for but also local girl Kajsa Bergqvist - ranked by Track & Field News as the No 1 female high jumper in the world!
The Olympic bronze medallist - who claims that the crowd reception she received in the "GE Globen Galan" one year ago is her perhaps biggest thrill emotionally so far as an athlete - will try to repeat her victory from last year despite the presence of four more jumpers from the Sydney Top-6: Hestrie Cloete, Oana Pantelimon, Inga Babakova and Svetlana Zalevskaya!
From the national perspective also the 60m hurdles and the 400m will most likely attract a lot of attention. In the hurdles, surprising Olympic finallist Robert Kronberg will try to build on that momentum as well as the almost-NR seasonal opener he had when finishing second in Dortmund on Sunday.
In the 400m three top-Britons - Jamie Baulch, Daniel Caines and Mark Hylton - plus Olympic finalist Robert Mackowiak will provide an excellent opportunity for Jimisola Laursen to improve the national record of 46.47 he ran at the same meet last year as well as for Magnus Aare to achieve the qualifying standard for Lisbon.
However, the list of exciting events is even longer: The women’s 1500m with Violeta Szekely, Carla Sacramento and Irina Mikitenko, the men’s 800m with André Bucher, David Lelei and Japheth Kimutai and the 60m sprints featuring World Youth and Junior Champion Mark Lewis-Francis, Coby Miller, Christian Malcolm, Deji Aliu, Anzhela Kravchenko, Tayna Lawrence, Susanthika Jayasinghe, ...
And to top it all off: The real highlight of the evening might still very well be provided by the men’s pole vault featuring the very much in-form German Danny Ecker fresh from his 5.96 on Friday in Chemnitz and 6.00 on Sunday in Dortmund!
