Running News Daily

Running News Daily is edited by Bob Anderson in Mountain View, California USA and team in Thika Kenya, La Piedad Mexico, Bend Oregon and Chandler Arizona.   Send your news items to bob@mybestruns.com  Advertising opportunities available.   Over one million readers and growing.  Train the Kenyan Way at KATA Running Retreat Kenya.  (Kenyan Athletics Training Academy) in Thika Kenya.  Opening in june 2024 KATA Running retreat Portugal.  Learn more about Bob Anderson, MBR publisher and KATA director/owner, take a look at A Long Run the movie covering Bob's 50 race challenge.  

Index to Daily Posts · Sign Up For Updates · Run The World Feed

Share

South African Olympic champion Caster Semenya is focused on the 200m no matter the result of her appeal

South African Olympic champion Caster Semenya has locked her focus into the 200m, no matter the result of her appeal to overturn last year's Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) decision.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic rocked the sporting globe, Semenya was in a court battle to get the CAS decision that allowed athletics governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), to prescribe hormone-suppressing drugs for any woman with disorder of sex development (DSD) competing in 400m to 1 500m events.

Her last throw of the dice was the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, who had yet to reach a verdict by the time of the global sporting shutdown. In the meantime, Semenya, who outright refused to take the drugs, went to work on the 200m sprint distance.

"That’s decided; we’ll stick to 200m no matter what," Semenya told Athletics South Africa (ASA).

"We don’t care about any other decision-making. We will do what we can control now, which is the 200m. That’s the race we’re going to focus on the entire season and we do not care about any other stuff. Two hundred it is."

Before the lockdown, Semenya ran impressive 200m times at the Gauteng North Championships in March, recording 23.80 and a personal best 23.49 in her first few outings. However, she still had considerable work to reach the qualifying time of 22.80 for next year’s Tokyo Games.

It’s an unprecedented feat. The closest anyone’s ever been successful at short and middle distance events was Cuban Alberto Juantorena, who won an historic 400m and 800m double at the Montreal Games in 1976. Semenya has a mountain to climb just to make it to her third Games.

Semenya said, though, that she harbored love for the 200m race from her younger days before she developed into one of the best 800m runners of all time and a two-time Olympic 800m gold medalist.

"I’m that athlete who does not worry about times; I take it as it comes. We ran 23.80 and then 23.49 and in the nationals we were hoping to go a little bit down," she said.

"I’ve always said that I’m a power athlete; I can do anything from 100m to a marathon. I have power and speed, which has helped me run a better 800m. From a young age I did the 200m and it has always been easy to do sprints - I was born with sprints.

"It’s crazy but I’m enjoying it. I wish I ran 200m from age 12. I don’t know where I could have been now."

(05/20/2020) Views: 1,080 ⚡AMP
by Sibusiso Mjikeliso
Share


Running News Headlines


Copyright 2024 MyBestRuns.com 24,598