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Moscow World Indoor Championships – One Month to Go!
11.02.2006
Monte-Carlo – There is exactly one month to go to the start of the 11th IAAF World Indoor Championships, Moscow, Russia, 10-12 March 2006. These championships which take place in the Olimpiyski Sport Palace Complex, will be the first of seven IAAF World Athletics Series (WAS) events to be staged in 2006.
There is of course no doubt that Russia is a most appropriate venue for these championships, as if we think back to the last edition of the ‘World Indoors’ which were hosted by Budapest in 2004, of the six World Indoor Records which were either equalled or broken on that occasion in Hungary, five were achieved by Russian athletes.
The Russian women’s 4x400m Relay squad’s thrilling World record, along with Swede Christian Olsson’s record equalling mark in the men’s Triple Jump brought the 2004 championships to a rousing climax. Yet only the day before Russia’s Tatyana Lebedeva and Yelena Isinbayeva had astonished us all with the best ever indoor performances in their events, the Triple Jump and the Pole Vault…Lebedeva even accomplished that feat three times over!
In the last two summer seasons both Isinbayeva and Lebedeva in particular have gone to produce many other headline feats but even more recently the host nation has indicated it is taking the indoor season especially seriously this year. In the last few weeks a Russian women’s 4 x 400m relay quartet of Yuliya Gushchina, Olga Kotlyarova, Olga Zaytseva and Olesya Krasnomovets clocked 3:23.37* to take more than half a second from the World Indoor record set in Budapest two years ago.
With the quality of this present generation of Russian athletes, Muscovites will be drawn to the stadium in large numbers to see their national heroes and heroines perform on a home stage, and with a month to go this audience can be assured that the competition will be as international as ever. Although final figures will not be confirmed until closer to the competition, the IAAF is pleased to note that preliminary entries for 739 athletes have been received to date from 140 IAAF Member Federations.
IAAF
* pending ratification.
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