European Hurdles medallists Jenny Kallur (SWE) and Christina Vukicevic (NOR) are set to challenge World Indoor Champion, Derval O’Rourke (IRL) on home soil.
24-year-old Kallur is the twin sister of Susanna who is the current European Hurdles Champion and 2007 World ranked number 2. Jenny took the silver medal behind Susanna in the 60m Hurdles event at the Madrid European Indoor Championships in 2005 when just a few weeks earlier she recorded a phenomenal 7.28 second personal best time in Gothenburg. Jenny is a model of consistently high performance, and was a finalist in the 2005 Helsinki World Championships where she set new personal best figures of 12.85 seconds over the 100m Hurdles.
The Swede’s current Indoor time should provide ideal competition for O’Rourke, who beat Kallur when taking the European Outdoor silver medal in 2006 in a new Irish record of 12.72 seconds.
Also taking the start line will be Kallur’s training partner Christina Vukicevic. The 20 year old Norwegian is the World Outdoor Junior silver medallist from Beijing in 2006 where her national record time of 13.34 seconds was a mere one hundredth of a second behind the winner Shtepa of Russia. Christina recorded a commendable 13.07seconds time in the World Championships at Osaka last August.
O’Rourke will be hoping that these two classy athletes will provide her with the necessary impetus to record a good early season time in preparation for the World Indoors in Valencia at the beginning of March. The Irish Champion has fond memories of the Odyssey stadium where these Irish Indoor Championships will take place on the 26th and 27th January, two years ago O’Rourke defeated current World Outdoor bronze medallist Delloreen Ennis London of Jamaica to set a new Irish record time of 7.90 seconds.
The Irish Indoor Championships are organised and promoted by Athletics Northern Ireland and the Athletic Association of Ireland in conjunction with Belfast City Council and Sport NI as funding partners.
The event also incorporates the Phoenix "Olympic Flames’ Age Group Championships and also a ‘Search for a Star’ Primary School Initiative with children from across the area participating in a final race. These additional activities have all been designed to support Ireland’s commitment to actively target the next generation of potential athletes, providing with them as much support as possible running up to the Olympics.