TNT Sports
Day 2: Strutting her stuff
By
Published 07/08/2005 at 11:58 GMT+1
After a dramatic day one in the heptathlon the competition between the current Olympic and World champion Carolina Kluft and the current world leader Eunice Barber only tightened, with Kluft surpassing Barber amid controversy in the day's opening heptathl
Eurosport
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With one event left to go in the heptathlon, Saturday night's 800 metres, Kluft clung to a minascule 18-point advantage over France's Barber.
In the fourth event of the competition, Kluft won the long jump with a season's best jump of 6.87m to overtake Barber's 2 point lead at the start of the day after Barber only could manage her own season's best of 6.75m.
The French team attempted to protest Kluft's jump, as video replay appeared to show that Kluft had clearly crossed the line.
But the IAAF's Jury of Appeal ruled that the judges had made the correct decision in waving the white flag.
After Barber maded up some ground on Kluft in the Javelin, the 22-year-old Swede led Barber 5906 to 5888.
Record walk
Russian Olimpiada Ivanova set the world record in the 20km race-walk Saturday, winning the championship in a time of 1:25.41.
Ivanova set the pace throughout the day's first event, striding into the championship stadium more than a full minute ahead of her nearest challenger and draping herself in the Russian flag.
"I'm the happiest woman in world today," the 34-year old Ivanova told reporters.
"I set out to walk in approximately one hour and 27 minutes and that's pretty much what I did. Everything went more or less according to plan, the race was pretty easy.
"I'm an old walker but with each year I savour my victories more."
Ivanova won the championship four years ago in Edmonton, but was forced to pull out of the Paris championships two years ago.
Belarus' Margarita Turova took silver at 1:27.05 and Portugal's Susana Feitor took bronze in 1:28.44.
Two of Ivanova's main competitors were disqualified from the event, as China's Jiang Jing and Greece's Athanasia Tsoumelaka went out of the race.
In the race walk competitors are eliminated after receiving three warnings, which are given if they break proper form by not having one foot on the ground throughout the race.
Jiang, the second fastest woman in the world entering the championships, was the only one who kept pace with Ivanova in the beginning of the race, but was eliminated early on.
Tsoumelaka, the Olympic gold medalist at Athens in 2004, left the race in tears after receiving her third warning.
Ivanova, however, did not even receive a single warning in her record breaking performance.
Dashing expectations
The preliminaries for the women's 100 metres dash finished pretty much according to foil, with the top seeds advancing aftrer racing a windy Helsinki track.
Both France's Christine Aaron and the Bahamas' Chandra Sturrup won their respective heats with the event's top qualifying time of 11.15 seconds.
Olympic champion Yuliya Nesterenko finished right behind Aaron at 11.21 seconds in their heat, but Aaron raced to expectations as she has ran exceedingly well this year winning all three of her Golden League races this season.
"It was a nice race," Arron said to reporters. "The start was good and technically it also went well. The time was ok but I'm ready to do better."
Sturrup, who has the top performance of the year thus far, looked strong in her race.
In brief
In the women's pole vault world record holder and Olympic champion Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia easily advanced through the preliminaries vaulting an automatic qualifying of 4.45m.
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