http://www.iaaf.org/WJC04/news/Kind=2/newsId=25862.html
Can Usain Bolt achieve historic double win? - one week to go to Grosseto World Junior Champs!
Tuesday 6 July 2004
Monte-Carlo - With exactly one week to go to the start of the 10th IAAF World Junior Championships which will take place in Grosseto, Italy from 13-18 July, the attention of media world wide will focus on younger athletes, aged 16 to 19, who represent the future of the sport.
Among the 1500 athletes from a record 183 countries who will gather in Grosseto, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt stands out as the overwhelming favourite for victory in the 200m, an event at which he was successful in Kingston World Juniors and Sherbrooke World Youth Championships.
200m World Junior record holder, Bolt doesn’t just represent the future of sprinting; he is also a current star of the discipline. His 19.93 clocking from last 11 April still stands as the fastest time of the year in the Senior World lists and Bolt does have a chance of success not just in Grosseto but also in Athens Olympic Games a month later.
Many athletes have won the World Junior Championships and then consecutively stepped up and won the Olympic Games but no-one has ever medalled, let alone won, individual events in the two competitions in the same year.
Double World Junior sprint champion Veronica Campbell is the only athlete who has medalled in World Juniors and Olympic Games in the same year, as she won the 100m and 200m in Santiago de Chile and silver with the 4x100m Jamaican relay team in Sydney.
Poland’s Kamila Skolimowska won the Hammer Throw gold at the Sydney Olympic Games but did not qualify for the final at the World Junior Championships in Santiago de Chile a few weeks later that same year.
Will Usain Bolt become the first ever athlete to win both the World Junior Championships and the Olympic Games in the same year? Needless to say the achievement would be historic, yet Bolt still needs to counter the 200m specialists who will be hungry for gold in Athens, especially the defending Olympic Champion and Greek hero Kostas Kenteris.
Bolt’s first step towards history will be in Grosseto where he will aim at becoming the only sprinter to win back to back World Junior titles.