Athletics 2022

Keely Hodgkinson is a phenomenal talent. Jenny Meadows, who is involved in her coaching, mentioned that she tore her quad recently. She believes that Keely could have run a second or two faster, had her training not been interrupted.

Athing Mu will have a serious rival in the coming years for sure.

Rhasidat Adeleke won her section of the 400m final in the Big 12, clocking 52.33. She finished 3rd overall. Davicia Patterson won the 600yds.

Great to see Irish women’s sprinting reaching new heights.

On a related note, Phil Healy also ran 51:75 in the 400m final, just 0.01 seconds outside her recent PB. She’s getting consistent in the 51:7x range. If she can drop another couple of tenths of a second of her PB in Belgrade, she could be knocking on the door of the final in Belgrade.

What’s even more encouraging about Phil Healy’s PB is that it was achieved with two blatant tactical errors. The first was at the mid-point break as she battled with Swiety-Ersetic and was pushed wide. The second was when she tried to pass again with ~120m to go and ran out of legs in the home straight.

I’m convinced that there is at least a couple more tenths of a second in her wheelhouse. Let’s hope she can bring it to Belgrade.

On a related note, Polish female 400m running is just amazingly deep right now. Kielbasinska set a new indoor NR of 51:10 a few weeks ago, Kaczmarek ran 51:15 finishing second to Femke Bol in Toruń, and now Swiety-Ersetic has just run 51:22. They can also draft in Baumgart-Witan for the relay. The US will have an almighty battle on their hands for gold, given the shape of the Polish women.

Significant result from the Polish indoor championships this weekend. Ewa Svoboda ran 6.99 in the 60m final. She’s the first woman globally to break the 7.00 second barrier since 2018. She has to be considered the gold medal favorite in Belgrade.

The women’s 400m final was also a barn burner. The aforementioned Justyna Swiety-Ersetic was victorious in a new national record of 51:04, despite running the entire second lap in lane 2. Kielbasinska and Kaczmarek were second and third in 51:20 and 51:24 respectively. Their fourth string athlete, Baumgart-Witan, is coming back from injury and ran 52:10. She will be faster in Belgrade. As above, they will be a formidable team at World Indoors.

Poland seems to be the European athletics powerhouse right now. I wonder is there something we can learn from their talent identification and coaching methodologies?

Can Jakob break EL Gs 1500 and mile records with right conditions? I see he bagged indoor 1500 record

As with all these things, it's very hard to know.

But just to put his run last night into perspective. At 17 he is top 13 all time Irish indoors. And from I can make out is just over 1 second off a world u20 indoor record. Jacob has run 3.52 outdoors at 17.

Last night race was a fantastic run. And was more or less a time trial as he was aided by sitting on Coscoran. All be it he was able to and even challenged him over the last 100m. There is a difference in between that and having to race a championship race that might be more tactical or run at a slower pace. There maybe a number of other factors to take into account like injuries, burnout or many other things that life throws at you,

But for sure he's as good a prospect to ever come out of Ireland. Let's hope he can continue his progression

Adeleke runs in both 60 and 200 finals tonight. By the luck of the draw she's in lane 6 for the 200 final. Should be interesting.

BBC2 will be showing the world indoors next week

Super run by Healy. Very cool! Scott through also. Becker's race was interesting. 🤣🤔

The standard of refereeing (or whatever it's called) is laughable. We had a women 60 heat where a poor athlete was disqualified for a false start on line 7, where very very clearly (both on replay, and on the data) it was lane 8. She had to protest for the mistake to be rectified. Poor girl.

Then we had a GB athlete woman disqualified in the 400 where she was clearly pushed off the track but still managed to finish 2nd. Got reinstated on appeal.

I am a newbie on these things but why are the decisions so poor? Is it always like that?

Buzzing for Sarah Lavin. Great, clean run with 7.97. No expectations on her for the final. She can just go out there later and give it a lash. Hopefully, run another PB.

I know it’s not fair to single out a particular athlete, but I’m really not sure why Athletics Ireland continue selecting Siofra Cleirigh-Buttner.

She clearly doesn’t have the temperament to compete at this level. Why not give somebody like Georgie Hartigan a shot, who is in good form and seems like she could give a decent account of herself?

The two 1500m guys were pretty poor too. Andrew Coscoran put himself in the mix, but just didn’t have it at the end. Fair play to Sarah Lavin for raising her game and producing PBs when it truly matters.

Miller-Uibo is such a great runner, she controlled the race from the start. She was hardly panting at the end.

Agreed on Marcel Jacobs. He seems like a nice guy too, not carrying around a huge ego. Coleman was like a spoiled child in his after-race interviews.

Garcia wasn’t a surprise to me. He destroyed Bryce Hoppel over the last lap in the Grand Prix in Staten Island last month. He clearly has plenty of pace.

I usually prefer the women’s 400m vs. the men’s, but the latter was more exciting this time around. Nice run by Jereem Richards to run 45-flat indoors. Three guys under 45.40 is impressive. I’m a big fan of Femke Bol, but the media hyped her up far too much. She’s very talented, but never stood a chance against SMU in a flat 400m. Having said that, I reckon she is capable of running 49.xx outdoors and could potentially medal if she ever chooses to abandon the hurdles.

Biggest surprise for me is the American girl who took bronze in the 60m- Mary Beth Sant Price. Never heard of her before and she doesn’t look like a typical sprinter. She’s very slight, with little muscle tone compared to somebody like Svoboda or Kambundgi. Interesting to see if she can carry that form over to 100m outdoors.

A whopper of a world record for Rojas in the Triple jump. Beyond her own outdoor record.

BBC 2 from 3.30pm