| The winners of the Golden League jackpot have been determined Olympic champion 400m runner Toni Williams-Darling from the Bahamas and triple jump specialist Swede Christian Olsson won the “jackpot” - the main prize of the prestigious Golden League athletics series. At the sixth stage of these competitions in Berlin, they once again won, and now two athletes just need to take part in the “World Finals” in Monaco on September 18 to equally divide a million dollars between themselves.
61 thousand spectators gathered at the Berlin Olympic Stadium to watch the starts of the final stage of the Golden League. In addition to the triumph of the black runner and the Scandinavian jumper, they witnessed three victories of Russian women. Elena Slesarenko showed the best result in the high jump sector - two meters exactly, Tatyana Lebedeva excelled in the long jump, Tatyana Tomashova finished first in the 1500 meter race. True, the discipline in which the winner of the gold and bronze medals of the Lebedev Summer Games competes is not included in the league standings, but this does not change the essence: our girls, who successfully competed at the Olympics, confirmed their high class in Berlin.
The Golden League competitions have been held since 1998. Each season, the International Athletics Federation (IAAF) changes the types of programs that are included in the series. This is done so that representatives of different disciplines are on approximately equal terms and have the opportunity to earn a lot of money. The principles for determining the winners of the entire series, that is, the athletes admitted to sharing the “jackpot,” have remained generally unchanged all these years. It was necessary to win either most of the stages of the season, or absolutely everything, as in the current season. Among the Russians, the tournament laureates included Tatyana Kotova (long jump, 2000), Olga Egorova (3000/5000 m, 2001). Three years ago, six athletes shared the jackpot, and only last season the Golden League had a single winner - Maria Mutola from Mozambique (800 m).
When big money is at stake, this naturally implies the possibility of collusion among athletes. Simple arithmetic shows that for an athlete who has one or two stages left to win the absolute result, it is more profitable to stimulate his opponents than to risk his future bonuses. However, in the Golden League, dishonest play was stopped already in the second season of the tournament’s existence. In 1999, Kenyan Bernard Barmassai asked his compatriot Christopher Koskei to let him go ahead in the 300m hurdles in order to retain the right to share the “jackpot”. This conspiracy, due to the talkativeness of the athletes, became public knowledge, and both Kenyans were disqualified.
Before the Berlin stage, only Williams and Olsson had five victories to their credit. In Germany they won more than confidently. Olsson, in a headwind, flew 17 m 45 cm, 24 cm ahead of American Davis Walter, who took second place. Williams, with the best result of the season in the world (49.07 sec.), was almost half a second ahead of Mexican Ana Guevara.
For some participants, the Berlin stage became an opportunity to take revenge from their competitors for their defeat at the Olympics. For example, the silver medalist of the Games Tatyana Tomashova this time was ahead of the Athens gold medalist Kelly Holmes from Great Britain. The fight at the finish line was exciting - the Russian woman finished just 0.08 seconds ahead of her dark-skinned rival. Elena Slesarenko finally finished off the 2003 world champion Estrie Cloet (South Africa). Before the Olympics, the African won all four stages of the Golden League, and then the time came for the jumper from Volgograd. She beat Cloet at the Olympics and then dashed her hopes of a share of the jackpot by beating her at the Van Damme Memorial in Brussels. This time in Berlin, Cloet was only third, and Slesarenko, with the same result as the American Amy Acuff, became the winner thanks to fewer attempts. Ilya TRISVIATSKY |
|
