Women's 800 - Situation Normal

By LEN JOHNSON

You would be tempted to say that Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old South African who has made an amazing break-through in women’s 800 metres, could not possibly come from obscurity to world champion in just one year.

You’d be tempted, yes, but only for as long as it takes to remember that Pamela Jelimo did precisely that en route to becoming Olympic champion last year. Jelimo turned 19 at the end of December last year. Then you might remember that Janeth Jepkosgei, a little older than these two precocious teens but scarcely more experienced, had pulled off the same trick to win the world championships gold medal in Osaka the year before that.

So, two years (2007 and 2008), two unknowns, two new champions _ suddenly a win by Semenya in Berlin might not be such a surprise after all. Indeed, it would be situation normal.

What is it about the 800 which makes it so susceptible to being won by relative newcomers. As with the high jump _ remember Donald Thomas, the young Bahamian who was fourth in the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006, jumping 2.23 metres in a pair of gym shoes, then won at the world championships the following year with 2.35? _ it is possible to make a big impact in the 800 armed with a large dose of natural talent and not much else.

Added to that, the women’s 800 had stagnated before Jepkosgei, Jelimo and now, perhaps, Semenya came along. Certainly there is justifiable suspicion about some of the times run back in the 1980s when performance-enhancing drugs were a far more prevalent problem on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but to not even be approaching that level of performance a quarter of a century later suggests athletes were not running with much ambition until recently.

I remember ringing Ron Clarke in London for a comment on the Chinese Ma’s Army athletes’ performances in Stuttgart in 1993. While many rejected the times out-of-hand, Australia’s greatest distance runner argued they were plausible. It was what women should be running.

Semenya 1:56.72, Jelimo 1:54.01 last year, Jepkosgei 1:56.04 the year before that _ it’s what women should be running for 800. With Jelimo and Jepkosgei at last showing signs of returning to form at the recent Kenyan trials and American Maggie Vessey _ at 27, at the opposite end of the age spectrum to Semenya _ breaking through to 1:57.84, maybe it’s what someone will have to run to win the gold medal in Berlin. Let’s hope so.

With the world championships imminent, it’s a good time to reflect on our most recent medallists _ 2007 champions Jana Pittman-Rawlinson and Nathan Deakes, and 2005 bronze medallist Craig Mottram.

Not one of them has got to Berlin, further confirmation, if any were needed, that modern athletics is a sport in which you must take your chances when they arise, for they may not come around again.

At the start of the year, with Deakes battling his chronic hamstring problems, Mottram rehabilitating sore achilles tendons, and Rawlinson-Pittman not fit enough to race on the domestic circuit, I wondered whether we had seen the best of each, or, at the very least, whether any of the three would achieve anything higher than what they had already done.

I wonder still. Deakes was a world-record breaker at the 50km at the end of 2006 and a world champion nine months later. The only greater achievement he could have would be an Olympic gold medal. Pittman-Rawlinson is a dual world champion in the 400 metres hurdles; again, only an Olympic gold medal would top that. Mottram was a world championships bronze medallist, the first non-African medallist for almost 20 years, and is one of the few men to have beaten Kenenisa Bekele. World or Olympic gold, or a world record, would be among the few things that could top that.

All three are capable still of returning to the same performance levels as before. Garnering further and higher honours is a far tougher thing. We should all wish them well in both pursuits.


 

Len Johnson was The Melbourne Age athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games. He is the author of The Landy Era, From Nowhere to the Top of the World, and a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) who trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella.

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