Marlon Devonish says Britain should avoid rushing its next batch of promising sprinters into the senior international arena.
The Coventry-based Olympic relay gold medallist, 31, said: "There are some good lads coming through, but I think it would be wrong to rush them.
“It might result in irreparable damage, and in the long term it will not be the best policy.”
Devonish won the 100m at Friday’s Primo Nebielo Memorial meeting in Turin.
Together with Jason Gardener, Mark Lewis-Francis and Darren Campbell - now retired - he won 4x100m relay gold at the Athens Olympics.
Devonish believes the relay team for August’s World Championships in Osaka should be built around the remaining trio, provided they are in form.
Last year’s European 200m bronze medallist said: “I’m not going to be around forever, but I want to run at the Worlds and in the Beijing Olympics.”
UK Athletics want the relay success of Athens to be repeated on home territory at the 2012 London Games, with young sprinters including world junior 100m champion Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, Dwayne Grant, Tyrone Edgar, Craig Pickering and Ryan Scott coming through.
Russian coach Michael Khmel was appointed 14 months ago to develop a strategy for the relay events.
No mention of Rikki Fifton(u23) again… He ran a quality race in Geneva - 10.20 to place 2nd in the UK behind MLF. Oh and speaking of retirement…
Darren Campbell comes out of retirement for his club
08 June 2007
Britain’s Darren Campbell is returning to the track 10 months after retiring. The Olympic relay gold medallist and European 100m Champion in 1998, is to appear for his club, Sale Harriers, Manchester in a British League match in Birmingham next month.
The 33-year-old, who quit last summer, winning his final 100m race at the Celtic Cup International in Scotland one week after landing gold for the British 4x100m relay squad in Gothenburg, has accepted a request from Sale who need him for the fixture on July 7.
On Monday Sale’s manager, Dean Hardman, contacted him and Campbell, talking to a British newspaper said: “I told him on retiring that, if I was in any kind of shape, I would like to run for my club. He wants me to run in a B 100 and a relay maybe because other members of the club are not around because people are preparing for the AAA Championships or are away.”
Campbell dismissed talk that this could lead to a comeback in top- class competition.
Sounds like Marlon’s scared of losing his spot! The fastest 4 should go, end of. Why would you ever leave out Pickering - he’s clearly a yard faster than anyone else in the country.
As for Cambell he shouldn’t have even been in the team for that controversial win at the Europeans - couldn’t even make the trials final as I recall!!
You do need to have hand offs- look at the USA problems. That said, a difference of .2 has to be looked at seriously and the other factor is consistency of speed, needed to make effective changes. That can’t be done when one member is notably slower than the incoming and outgoing runners.
When the outgoing runner is significantly faster than the incoming one, I just hold my breath. It’s not quite so scary when the incoming one is faster.
Yes John…it mashed him up! He PB’d twice that day…10.31 in the heat and 10.20 in the final…An amazing feat as many don’t know he was up most of the night on the toilet with a ‘weak bottom’ lol… i blame the food on the flight over!
If you saw him during the warm up, you would have said no way is this guy running 10.69 today let alone 10.20.
Yeah, I’ve had that happen. But that is not a result of the speed difference. That means the mark is wrong. Or, more commonly, the outgoing runner is off in dreamland, frozen with anxiety, or some such. There is always some mark that, if executed properly, will result in an optimum pass, no matter how much faster the incoming runner is. It just may be a heckuva long ways up the track.
Well not always! In the case I was thinking of, we had 2 girls from the old days and two new ones. Since the “old ones” were light years slower, i just stuck them on the last two legs (why kill the faster girls trying to make up for the other two). The second girl came in so much faster than the third going out (all the speed she had) that she damn near gave her whiplash. So the 4 x 100 girls ran 45.4 sec.
Next came the 4 x 200 relay and the same issue. Again, I lined up the two “new era” girls first and second and the “old era” 3rd and 4th. The first two ran the 400m in 44.0. So we’d have done a site better running the 4 x 100 with just two girls!
For your next ebook (Random Stories From Dr Evil), I’d love to hear about these types of stories. Re-reading Speed Trap, I laughed so hard at Super Mike and his Atomic Bomb and when the young girl and Ben who was told he wouldn’t know what to do and Ben said the first he’d do is throw (name)'s ass out the door. hahaha
so…84, 92, 2000…not that much from those kind of guys…consider that they always have the lowest improvements form the sum of 100 times of the realys men…France, when held WR, had no one under 10"00…
The US sprinters see each other as rivals, not teammates. They don’t see the relay as important to them individually. They don’t care whether it is important to their federation or their country. They don’t want to practice, just go out and run, collect their gold medals and move on. In '96, it was so refreshing to see how much the Canadian team cared about their relay performance and how much pride they took in it. I was rooting for them, and I’m an American.
What’s interesting as well, Canada had good changes- in the same order for those years but when the order was changed without a chance to perfect the changes in comp, it never went right again. As I’ve said about relays many times, you can’t cut the end off your blanket and sew it on the other end and make it any longer.
i blame the food on the flight over!