Pat Butcher
22 May 2000Athletics fans are used to multi-talented performers - sprinter/long jumpers, heptathletes, decathletes - but Alina Ivanova is rather different. She's a champion sprint-walker who graduated to being a top-class marathon runner with her success in Sunday's Prague International Marathon.
Given that the longest Olympic walk, at 50 kilometres, is further than the marathon, Ivanova's former speciality, the 10k walk virtually qualifies as a 'sprint'. She won that event in the IAAF World Championships in Tokyo 1991. It looked as if she had won the Olympic title too, a year later. But half an hour after the event, the Barcelona judges disqualified her for 'lifting'.
"I didn't want to walk any more after that. In fact, I only did one more race walk, in Denmark, but I can't remember where," she said after the Prague victory. Instead, she took the advice of a friend from her home town of Cheboksary, 600k south of Moscow, and she took up marathon running. The friend knew what she was talking about, she was Valentina Yegorova, the Barcelona Olympic champion, who would also win silver in Atlanta.
Ivanova started training with Yegorova, and soon she was running and winning marathons herself - three victories in 15 races - but none of the calibre of Prague, and certainly not in the time that she ran for victory. She won in 2hr 27min 42sec, taking four minutes off her best, and putting her in line for an Olympic place in the Russian marathon squad alongside Yegorova, who is already selected.
This performance came despite the refusal of US immigration authorities to give her a visa, to go for her usual winter training in Florida. She had made a mistake in her visa application. So she was confined to her home town, where temperatures can fall to minus 30 degrees celsius in winter.
On the other hand, Cheboksary is situated at 1000 metres altitude, and her elite group - three women under 2.30 for the marathon - pays a male friend, Sergey Smolin, to pace them in their fast runs. "He has run two hours, 23 minutes for the marathon, so it is perfect for us. We also go to Sochi (on the Black Sea), where it is warmer, and to Kislavodsk, which is also at 1000 metres altitude. But that is a bit close to Chechnya".
So, in fact a cold winter turned out to be a recipe for a hot performance. Ivanova is one of four sub 2.28 women with credentials for the two remaining Olympic places, to be chosen in June. But her manager, Luis-Felipe Posso says, "Whenever she has competed in international events, she has always run well, so I think she is very well respected by the federation as someone who can deliver. I'm sure she will be selected".
