Where being number one can come down to a few hundredths…
In the nine days prior to that, Berlin will host the 12th global gala of running, jumping, throwing, and the one with the wiggly walk. It’s 26 years since the first such event, in Helsinki, which came decades after athletics’ top brass first mooted the idea of a games separate from the Olympics. Back in ’83, Carl Lewis (100m), Ed Moses (400m hurdles), Heike Drechsler (long jump) and Daley Thompson (decathlon) were among the gold medal winners. Fittingly for the 24 Team USA athletes who put in lung-bursting efforts to make the podium, the number one song back home back then was Every Breath You Take by The Police.
6Consecutive podiums topped by Sergey Bubka.
The Ukranian pole-vaulter was a rippling stripling back at the first Championships in 1983, snatching a surprise gold four months before his 20th birthday. He also won in Rome in 1987 and Tokyo in 1991, and then, following the decision to hold the Worlds every two years instead of four, in Stuttgart (1993), Gothenburg (1995) and Athens (1997). No other athlete has managed to ‘six-peat’. Bubka still holds the indoor and outdoor world records, set on February 21, 1993 and July 31, 1994 respectively, at non-Championship meetings. That those record heights are 6.15m and 6.14m respectively also proves, scientifically, that air is thinner and easier to pass through inside than it is outside (or something).
Polevaulter Yevgeniy Lukyanenko will seek to emulate Sergey Bubka in Berlin.
14 Championship medals won by Merlene Ottey…
… the most by any athlete. Back in Helsinki in 1983, she finished 0.06s behind East Germany’s Marita Koch in the 200m final (evidence would later show Koch to have been taking steroids during that time). Fourteen years later, Ottey took bronze in the same event, in Athens, aged 37. Between those medals, she won three golds, three further silvers and six further bronzes across the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m. She could have won more, but a drugs scandal, of which she was cleared of any wrongdoing, caused her to miss the 1999 Champs. She went on to compete for new home Slovenia in the 2003 event in Paris and, incredibly, finished fourth in her 100m heat in Osaka in 2007, aged 47. Ottey was in training earlier this year but didn't manage to qualify for Berlin. But she does qualify for a free bus pass and eye tests.
0.04Seconds shaved off the world 100m record…
… by Carl Lewis when he won gold in Tokyo at the 1991 Championships, the second largest breaking of the record behind Maurice Greene’s 0.05s lopping-off at the Athens Grand Prix in 1999. Lewis clocked 9.86s, and the five men behind him also ran under 10s – the greatest sprint to that date. Five days later, Lewis posted what is still the best set of six long jumps in history, but was beaten to gold by his USA team-mate Mike Powell, who posted 8.95m with his fifth jump to pip Lewis by 4cm with a world record that stands today. Neither man performed so well again. Why the ‘miracles’? The Tokyo track didn’t meet IAAF regulations, and was in effect too hard and fast. Lewis, Powell and the man whose job it was to play The Star-Spangled Banner did not complain.
228Months' age gap…
… between the oldest and youngest Championships gold medallists. They were born in Octobers, 23 years apart, and won their medals in Augusts only four years apart. Abél Anton (born 1962) won the men’s marathon aged 36 in Seville in 1999 in front of a crowd of his countrymen delirious with national pride and the 49 per cent humidity. In Paris, in 2003, then-unknown Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba (born 1985) stunned athletics with victory in the women’s 5,000m, aged 17. She defended her title in 2005 in Helsinki, beating her older sister Ejegayehu into third, and will be going for a fourth gold in a row in Berlin. If you ever meet her parents, ask them for lottery numbers: Tirunesh, in the Amharic language, means ‘You are good’.
46Countries boasting an athlete that won at least one medal…
… in the 2007 Championships. The last time the third-biggest world TV sports event (behind the Olympics and the World Cup) was staged, in Osaka, the little lands got in on the action along with the traditionally triumphant territories. Panama secured a first-ever WAC medal thanks to Irving Saladino’s victory in the long jump. He also won gold at the Olympics in Beijing last year, as did Primoz Kozmus of Slovenia, who could only manage silver in Osaka throwing his hammer, his country’s second-ever medal. And congratulations to Hatem Ghoula, who won bronze in the 20km walk and thus earned Tunisia its debut on the all-time Championships medals table. Hatem? They love him over there!
Full coverage of the action in Berlin can be found at www.iaaf.org
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