High jumper Hestrie Cloete makes her first appearance on home soil since becoming world champion
Martin Gillingham
The appearance of world high jump champion Hestrie Cloete at the Herman Immelman stadium in Germiston on Friday should ensure the season gets off to the fastest possible start at the first meeting in the 2002 Absa series.
It’s a watershed year for South African athletics. This year marks the end of the multimillionrand deal with Absa, which has bankrolled the sport for the past five years. There is no word yet on whether the bank will renew its contract. On the track, the Commonwealth Games in Manchester will provide an opportunity to restore South Africa’s sporting pride.
Cloete, at the tender age of 23, has already established herself as one of the great high jumpers. Of the three major championships, she has struck gold at two of them the Commonwealth Games and world championships and silver at the other, the Olympic Games. Tonight she will compete on home soil for the first time as world champion. It will be a rare treat for the Germiston faithful.
No high hurdler out of the Americas ran faster last year than Shaun Bownes. The former policeman was third in Kuala Lumpur four years ago and is tailoring his campaign with a view to Manchester. “At the end of last season I took a longer break than normal,” he says. “I didn’t train for eight weeks so I’m looking to run somewhere in the region of 13,5sec or 13,4sec during the Absa series.”
Bownes’s 13,26sec at Heusden in July was his eighth improvement of the South African record.
Bownes is among a handful of South Africans who will travel to the north-west of England with a favourite’s chance. One of the most competitive events in Manchester will be the men’s 400m hurdles. South Africa will take two potential medallists and both are in action on Friday. Llewellyn Herbert’s Edmonton tantrum could see him embark on a charm offensive with the press corps this season. Alas, his opponents on the track are unlikely to be the beneficiaries of such concessions.
Herbert, who has yet to compete at the Commonwealth Games and whose only title of international significance was the World Student Games crown five years ago, gets his season off to a start in the flat 400m. It promises to be a competitive affair with Adriaan Botha, Jopie van Oudtshoorn and world sprint-relay silver medallist Lee-Roy Newton among the competition. Czech Jiri Muzik, a 400m hurdles finalist at last year’s world championships, adds international spice to the strongest field of the night and which, at 9.20pm, provides the climax to the meeting.
Alwyn Myburgh, the latest pretender to Herbert’s hurdling crown, goes in the 400m hurdles. He lines up against another Czech, Stepan Tesarik, who returns to South Africa 12 months after beating Myburgh at last year’s season’s opener. Since then, however, Myburgh has gone on to improve his best to 48,09sec. That was good enough to emulate Herbert in winning the World Student Games title: a title Myburgh won in Beijing in a time that ranked him seventh in the world last year.
The most intriguing clash on the women’s programme is that between two of Africa’s finest young prospects in the 1 500m. Nineteen-year-old Anna Ndege of Tanzania ran 4:12,28 in Port Elizabeth last year it ranked her fifth on the 2001 world junior lists and she goes head-to-head with the South African Lynelle Coetzee whose 2:03,09 over 800m in last year’s Engen meeting at Roodepoort was the world’s fourth fastest time by a teenager last year. At 16, Coetzee is the most outstanding middle-distance prospect this country has produced since Rene Kalmer. Just how much she’s improved since last season we’ll see at Germiston.
Athletics South Africa has abandoned plans to appoint the sport’s first full-time national coach at least, for now. A deadline for January 1 had been set to have the new person in place. But that date has come and gone and chief executive Banele Sindani admits: “It looks like we’ve reached the point where we may have to explore alternatives.”