Idowu Leaps Back With Win
Sat 29 May, 7:11 PM
British triple jumper Phillips Idowu, who missed the whole of last season with a knee injury, hit the Olympic standard when he made a winning return to action at an international meeting at Szombathely in Hungary on Saturday afternoon.
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The 25-year-old east Londoner, who is determined to follow in the footsteps of retired world record holder and Olympic champion Jonathan Edwards, reached 17.00metres in his first competition for 18 months.
It was 68cm short of his lifetime best, but over the Olympic Games ‘A’ standard of 16.95m, which was his target for the day. The Commonwealth Games silver medallist conceded his run-up was rusty but described the jump as “quite satisfactory.”
Andy Turner (Notts AC), who hurdled for Great Britain at last summer’s European Cup, also put in a performance designed to impress the Team GB selectors for Athens by winning the 110m hurdles in 13.53 seconds, two-hundredths of a second inside the Olympic ‘A’ standard.
Turner’s training colleague Sarah Claxton (Belgrave Harriers) also clocked a lifetime best, 13.05 seconds, to win the women’s 100m hurdles from AAA champion Rachel King, who clocked 13.25.
Former national champion Diane Allahgreen (Trafford AC) was fourth in 13.33 in her first international race since an Achilles operation that kept her out of action all of last summer.
Sydney Olympian Jared Deacon (South Shields Poly) won the 400m, despite being drawn in lane eight. He clocked 46.62 seconds to beat 20-year-old Rober Tobin (Basingstoke Mid Hants) by 0.11sec.
In the 800m 21-year-old James Nasrat (Newport Harriers) won in 1:47.69.