Maryam Yusef Jamal victorious at the World Cup (© Getty Images)
MonteCarloIn the penultimate episode of their review of the 2006 Athletics year, statisticians A. Lennart Julin and Mirko Jalava reach the topic of the MIDDLE DISTANCE running events.
MEN – Middle Distance
800m
The 800m season got to a really slow start with all of the fast races beginning to erupt only in July. Following his second place finish at the World Indoor Championships behind Wilfred Bungei (KEN), South African Mbulaeni Mulaudzi recorded a fine outdoor season winning five important races in a row in August-September, recorded a world leading time of 1:43.09, and only suffered two losses. But those losses did come in important places. First he could only finish sixth at the African Championships and then he was third at the World Cup in Athens. Mulaudzi’s best part of the season started in Zürich where he won with a fast 1:43.38 clocking. He followed this by winning in Monaco, Rieti (world leading 1:43.09), Berlin, and finally the World Athletics Final in Stuttgart. Mulaudzi’s season best time is his fastest in three years (PB 1:42.89 in 2003).
World Indoor champion Bungei was quite clearly number two in this event. Bungei’s outdoor season however only contained two big wins, he was timed 1:44.41 winning both Paris and Lausanne meetings in July. Amine Laalou set the Moroccan national record 1:43.25 winning in Rome in July, but could not back up that result during the rest of the season.
Olympic champion Yuriy Borzakovskiy (RUS) was also quite silent during this summer. Following his third place finish at the World Indoor Championships he won the Athens meeting in July in 1:43.42, but did not show much after that and also passed on the European Championships. The overall depth stayed the same it was in 2005 and 2004. 2006, 2005 and 2004 all had 25 athletes under 1:45. In 2003 there were 18. Not surprisingly Kenya is the strongest country in this event with 16 athletes in the world top 100, USA has 11 and Great Britain nine.
800m World Ranking
800m Performance List
1500m
Three athletes dipped under the magical 3:30 barrier during the 2006 season. Daniel Kipchirchir Komen set the world leading time of 3:29.02 (a PB) in Rome in July winning the race narrowly ahead of Rashid Ramzi (BRN) who set the Asian record finishing second in 3:29.14. Furthermore Bernard Lagat (USA) ran 3:29.68 in Rieti in late August to occupy the third place on the world list. But none of these athletes performed good enough during the season to be considered the best in their event.
22-year-old Alex Kipchirchir (KEN), the 800m World Junior champion from 2002, scored impressive wins during the summer. The Kenyan started his season with a 800m Commonwealth title and then went on to score a double win over 800/1500m at the African Championships in August. He also won important 1500m races in Monaco, at the World Athletics Final and at the World Cup. Kipchirchir furthermore won the Oslo Mile and took second places in Paris and Brussels 1500m races. During 2006 there were 26 athletes under 3:34, exactly the same with 2005. There were 30 in 2004 and 19 in 2003. Kenya tops this event with 21 athletes in the world top 100, USA and Morocco both have 11.
1500m World Ranking
1500m Performance List
WOMEN – Middle Distance
800m
The women's 800m seems to have entered a stage rather similar to that of its male counterpart: A large pool of rather evenly matched athletes which could finish in just about any order on any given day. There is currently no runner like Maria Mutola (MOZ) was for the previous decade or so, i.e. a runner that puts her stamp on the race and that wins most of the time.
Mutola was still competing in 2006 – actually she ended up No 2 on the World List – but she had just a handful of competitions and was not dominating those in the way she used to. The new No 1 Zulia Calatayud (CUB) is a completely different kind of runner favoring the strategy of letting others dictate the pace until putting in a strong finish drive in the decisive last hundred metres. A tactic which proved successful mostly in those not-fast-not-slow kind of races ending with winning times in the 1:59/2:00 brackett like the World Athletics Final and the World Cup. But Calatayud also lost some races and the current situation of the event is well illustrated by the fact that there were four different winners in the four Golden League meets featuring the event: Janeth Jepkosgei (KEN) in Oslo, Calatayud in Rome, Olga Kotlyarova (RUS) in Zürich and Hasna Benhassi (MAR) in Brussels.
Jepkosgei, the main "find" of 2005, compiled the greatest set of times (three of the seven fastest of the year) including the very fastest of 1:56.66 in narrowly defeating Mutola and Calatayud in Lausanne. And it should be noted that Jepkosgei in the WAF and World Cup lost to Calatayud by the total of just 11 hundredths. Given Jepkosgei's short international career she most likely will improve further and if she does she could end up as the first female Kenyan No 1 at a distance where her male counterparts have been the dominant force for decades.
Former 400m specialist Kotlyarova had her focus on the European Championships where she clearly was the class of the field although she was very close to losing it after letting herself get completely boxed in with just a hundred metres to go. She also had a couple of major wins on the circuit (Athens, Zürich).
The 800m "revelation" of 2006 was Briton Rebecca Lyne. Coming into this year her best was just 2:01 but discounting a fall in the European Cup, she ran faster than 2:01 in all her races this summer including three at 1:58. One of those 1:58's came at the European Championships where she got the bronze behind Russians Kotlyarova and Svetlana Klyuka.
Russia as always displayed the greatest depth of talent occupying positions 4-8 on the year lists. The general statistical impression of the year was also that of "nothing extraordinary": When making a comparison with 2005 there was nothing to observe but the expected trend of very slight improvements on all levels.
800m World Ranking
800m Performance List
1500m
One of the absolute highlights of the European Championships in Gothenburg was the women's 1500m. Rather than following the traditional championship pattern of slow pace followed by a sprint over the last lap it was run according to the philosophy that the winner should be the one capable of completing the distance in the quickest time.
The architects behind this were Russia's Yelena Soboleva and Yuliya Chizhenko who obviously wanted to take full advantage of the marked superiority they had shown earlier in the season: In Athens they had run 3:56 and 3:58, in Paris 3:56 and 3:55, and Soboleva also had a 3:58 from Lausanne – this while none of their Gothenburg opponents had dipped under even 4:00.
Chizhenko was the strongest in the European Championships final taking it out determinedly right from the start - as if she had been hired as a pace-setter - stringing together laps of 63, 65 and 64 seconds. This killed off Soboleva and the rest of the opposition except for the consummate championships specialist (two World Championships gold medals and one Olympic silver from the last three years) Tatyana Tomashova. The 31-year-old managed to hang on despite being forced by Chizhenko's pace into sub-PB territory and in the end kicked past to win in 3:56.91! This winning time didn't just constitute a new European Championship record (previous record had stood for 24 years) – it also surpassed all World Championship performances and has been bettered in only three Olympic finals, the last time in 1992!
Despite producing no less than nine times at 3:55-3:58 the Russian trio of Chizhenko, Soboleva and Tomashova didn't have the 1500m all to themselves. Bahrain's Maryam Jamal had a rather slow start to her season but finished in brilliant fashion setting a World best in Rieti with 3:56.18 and winning both World Athletics Final and World Cup and ending up 2-2 vs Chizhenko and 3-3 vs Tomashova. In December the Bahraini also took an Asian Games 800/1500m double.
Altogether Jamal and the three Russian contributed towards making 2006 a true vintage year for the 1500m: The score of eight sub-3:58 marks was the same as the sum of the last seven previous years. Looking at single years it has been surpassed only once (1997 when there were no less than 16 such marks in the Chinese National Games in Shanghai) and matched only once (over a quarter of century ago in 1980!). It should, however, also be noted that on deeper statistical levels 2006 was almost exactly on par with 2005.