When the Olympic Games in Sydney finished late in the 2000 season, most athletes headed home for a well-earned rest. Not Veronica Campbell. She’d been part of the Jamaican sprint relay team that won a silver medal. Then aged 18, she went on to Chile, where she won a blistering sprint double at the IAAF World Junior championships. She was earmarked from that moment as one to watch, a potential champion of the future.
But it’s only been this year that she’s really started to challenge the best in the senior world and arrived in Athens with the best 200m time in the world this year, 22.18. After taking a 100m bronze on Saturday, she tonight made herself an even firmer favourite for the longer sprint by clocking 22.13, a personal best and the fastest in the world in 2004.
She and her teammate Aleen Bailey, finishing second, two tenths of a second behind her, then danced a jig of joy at the side of the track in celebration at making their second final. Bailey also ran a personal best, while Kim Gevaert, in third, broke her own Belgian record with 22.48, running in lane two.
The double Commonwealth Games champion Debbie Ferguson was the fourth qualifier from the group, running 22.49. While Cydonie Mothersill of the Cayman Islands, who’d looked impressive in the earlier rounds, missed out.
Allyson Felix is another of the new generation who has come to the fore this year. Her best, 22.28, is second to Campbell on the world list. And it was she who won the first semi in similarly commanding fashion.
Felix ran a powerful bend in lane three and pulled clear of France’s relay golden girl Christine Arron, struggling to make up the ground a lane inside her. Felix led a strong field home in 22.36, winning by two tenths from the surprise finallist Abe Oyepitan. The Briton came within six hundredths of her best of 22.50, recording the same time as Bulgaria’s Ivet Lalova. Felix’s teammate Muna Lee was fourth with Arron a disappointing seventh.
This race may also have been a sad climax to one of the greatest Olympic careers. Merlene Ottey, the former Jamaican who now runs for Slovenia, started in lane seven but the holder of a record eight Olympic medals never made it into the home straight of what could be her final Olympic race.
The 44 year-old pulled up hobbling after 70 metres, apparently injured. Is this the last time we’ll see her? Well, perhaps on an Olympic stage, but in a press conference last week the veteran said she intends to run at the European Championships in 2006.
When asked if this would be her final Olympics she laughed and said: “I have been asked that every time since Barcelona. I have said ‘yes’, sometimes, and ‘maybe’. This time I’m saying I just don’t know.”
MB
