Ten newly crowned World Indoor
Champions to compete in Glasgow
Chris Turner for IAAF
16 March 2001 – Glasgow - The Norwich Union International, a five way team contest between Great Britain, an international All Stars team, last year's winners Russia, Scandinavia and a talented GB Lions team that will be held in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall on Sunday, will feature ten gold medallists from last weekend's World Indoor championships in Lisbon.
Last year Russia dominated the match winning ten out of the 17 events and will once again be led by their sensational middle distance star 19-year-old World and European indoor champion Yuriy Borzakovskiy. The Russian women's 4x400m relay gold medal winning team and women's European pole vault record holder Sveltlana Feofanova are also in the Russian line up.
The Glasgow crowd will be keen to welcome home Britain's new World indoor 400 metres champion Daniel Caines who is unbeaten over 400m this season. The precociously talented law student has brought his 400m PB down by over a second this winter from 46.79 to a best of 45.61 at last month's Norwich Union Indoor Grand Prix.
British sprinting will also be well represented in the 60 metres by Mark Lewis-Francis the world junior 100 metres champion who took the 60m bronze medal in the World Indoor championships in 6.51sec, the fastest time ever run by a junior. He will face American indoor specialist Greg Saddler and Christian Malcolm, the European Indoor 200m champion who will also compete in the longer sprint in Glasgow. Malcolm who took the silver medal at the 200 metres in Lisbon, will face fellow world championship finalist Allyn Condon at that distance this weekend.
In the men's triple jump the "father" of the British team, Olympic champion Jonathan Edwards will seek to reverse his world championship misfortune by beating Paulo Camossi the new World Indoor champion. Camossi set a new Italian record of 17.32 metres in the fourth round in Lisbon surprisingly taking the gold medal with Edwards' final leap of 17.26 metres good enough for silver.
Jamaica's World 200 metres indoor champion Juliet Campbell who at 32 years of age won her first ever world title in the fastest time in the world this year (22.64) will take on Britain's Olympic 400m fourth place finisher Donna Fraser at 200 metres.
At 400 metres world indoor silver medallist Russian Olga Kotlyarova will do battle with another emerging British sprint talent, AAA's 200m and 400m Indoor champion Catherine Murphy who was a semi finalist in Lisbon. While in the women's 800 metres Austria's Olympic silver medallist Stephanie Graf will try to get back to winning ways after mirroring her Sydney defeat when
losing again albeit in a much closer contest, to Olympic champion Maria Mutola in the world championships final last weekend.
In the women's long jump, double Olympic champion Heike Drechsler who finished a disappointing fifth in the world indoors and was one of many Sydney gold medallists to fail the competitive test in Lisbon, will be looking for a return to form in Glasgow. Drechsler will certainly hope to go one better for the International All Stars team than she did in last year's match when she was beaten by Russia's Tatyana Ter-Mesrobyan.
The star of the show in the women's high jump will be the new Swedish world champion Kajsa Bergqvist who became the first woman to clear 2m this year in Lisbon, adding the world indoor gold to the Olympic bronze medal she won in Sydney.
