Jessica Ennis of GBR receives the gold medal (© Getty Images)
Briton Jessica Ennis finished the women’s Pentathlon competition in exactly the emphatic style in which she started, winning another gold medal with a wide margin.
The 24-year-old went for it from the start of th 1000m and took the lead to go after the World record, but not surprisingly that proved to be a job too tough even for her. Ennis finished the race in 2:12.55, an indoor personal best for a total of 4937 points bettering Swede Carolina Klüft’s seven-year-old competition record of 4933 from Birmingham 2003 by a mere four points.
With a small margin too Ennis grabbed the British record from Kelly Sotherton who had scored the previous best of 4927 points, 10 points less than Ennis today, in Birmingham at the European Indoors Championships in 2007.
Ennis set four indoor personal bests during the competition in long jump, 800m and Pentathlon total score and was really close in the other two events 60m hurdles (missing by 0.09) and high jump (missed by 4cm). It was a class act by the Briton and don’t expect her to stop here, she has been that good in Berlin and Doha in the last two big meets.
Ennis moves to third place in the world alltime list behind Russian Irina Belova’s 4991 world indoor record and Carolina Klüft’s 4948 winning mark at the 2005 European Indoor Championships in Madrid. Additionally East German Anke Behmer has scored 4995 points in 1988 on oversized track.
Behind the clear winner the battle for the remaining two medals was absolutely fierce. As expected Ukrainian Olympic champion Nataliya Dobrynska and Russian Olympic bronze medalist Tatyana Chernova were clearly faster than Olympic silver medalist Hyleas Fountain in the 800m. But for a while in the new clash between the three Beijing medalists it seemed like the American could survive with a bronze medal, but in the final lap of the race Chernova just pulled too far off Fountain to grab the bronze. Dobrynska was surprisingly fresh in the final event easily winning the silver medal, her second in this competition in addition to a second place finish in 2004. Dobrynska ran an indoor personal best 2:14.85 in the 800m to crush her own national indoor record with 4851p adding a massive 73 points to the previous best 4778p from February 2010.
Chernova grabbed the bronze finishing in 2:13.19 for a total of 4762 points just edging Hyleas Fountain who equalled DeDee Nathan’s American record 4753 which won her the World indoor title in 1999 in Maebashi, Japan. Fountain faded to a 2:21.02 result in the last event losing the medal during the last lap of the race. Antoinette Nana Djimou Ida of France just missed her recent 4633 personal best scoring 4618 points for the fifth place.
Polish Karolina Tyminska was the fastest of the field in the 800m winning in 2:11.16 for a total of 4575p and sixth place. Russian Marina Goncharova scored 4416p for seventh place and Aiga Grabuste of Latvia was eighth with 4013p.
Mirko Jalava for the IAAF
Note:
In 2015, World Athletics revealed that a re-test of Chernova’s sample from 2009 was positive. After two years of legal processes, her punishment was a three year eight month suspension on top of the disqualification of all her results from August 15, 2009 to July 22, 2013. All of which meant that Fountain was the rightful bronze medallist.
