by Stuart Weir
Stuart Weir was in the house in Birmingham, England, one of my favorite arenas in the world! Here is his first story for the Birmingham Worl Indoor Tour Final
The World Indoor Series Final in Birmingham
The World Indoor Series Final in Birmingham delivered a high-quality program from beginning to end with nine Indoor champions crowned, two British records achieved, and a few near-miss record attempts. Then there was the men’s 60m race which only got underway after three athletes were DQed in two false starts. And there were enough stellar performances by the stars of British Athletics – Dina, Laura, Keely, etc – to send the home crowd home happy.
Winners of the different disciples were calculated from overall performances during the year – not the winner takes all of the Diamond League Final. The winners were:
Women
60m Aleia Hobbs
800m Keely Hodgkinson
3000m Lemlem Hailu
Pole Vault Alysha Newman
Men
400m Jereem Richards
1500m Neil Gourley
60H Grant Holloway
High Jump Hamish Kerr
Long Jump Tobias Montler
The unluckiest loser was Dina Asher-Smith who had the same amount of points as Aleia Hobbs but was awarded second place on countback.
The prestigious RunBlogRun awards are Presented as follows:
Best disguise: Marquis Dendy
Photographed with most other athletes: Grant Holloway
Most ingenious selfie: Asha Philip
Going back to those almost records, Gudaf Tsegay’s 8:16.69 fell just nine-hundredths of a second short of the world indoor 3000m record of 8:16.60 set by her compatriot Genzebe Dibaba in Stockholm in 2014.
Keely Hodgkinson ran a British record of 1:57.18 being her own 800m record but felt short of the woman record which was amazingly set by Jolanda Ceplak on the day Hodgkinson was born almost 21 years ago
Britain’s Olympic 1500m silver medallist Laura Muir was attacking Maria Mutola’s 2:30.94 set in 1999. On pace in the first half of the race, the lights started to move away from Muir a short while after and she had to be satisfied with the win in 2:34.53.
