As they jostle in the jet stream of Usain Bolt and Justin Gatlin, Asian sprinters will be battling for regional bragging rights at the athletics world championships in Beijing.
Just reaching the final of the 100m or 200m events would be an astonishing achievement for an Asian athlete given the gulf in quality.
While Jamaican giant Bolt, who holds the 100m world record of 9.58 seconds, is likely to be a speck in the distance, the tussle between China’s Su Bingtian and Asian Games champion Femi Ogunode of Qatar should provide an absorbing continental subplot.
Photo: AFP
Ogunode, Qatar’s Nigerian-born import, completed the sprint double at last year’s Asian Games, winning the 100m in 9.93 seconds and the 200m in 20.14 seconds after returning from a two-year doping ban.
However, locals will be roaring on Su, who earlier this year became the first Asian-born athlete to break the 10-second barrier when he clocked 9.99 seconds in a Diamond League meeting in Eugene, Oregon, behind race winner Tyson Gay.
Hailing from a rural corner of Guangdong Province, Su once carried bags for China’s top track stars before making his breakthrough by winning the national title in 2011.
His rivalry with Yoshihide Kiryu of Japan has so far failed to live up to its billing, mainly because of niggling injuries to the Japanese teen sensation.
Kiryu, 19, ran a wind-assisted 9.87 seconds in Texas earlier this year, but has been forced to pull out of the world championships with a muscle tear.
Japan have already unearthed a new gem in Tokyo schoolboy Abdul Hakim Sani Brown, who stormed to gold in the 100m and 200m at last month’s world youth championships in Cali, Colombia.
Born in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka to a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian father, the 16-year-old is to become the youngest athlete to represent Japan at the world championships when they start tomorrow.
Sani Brown, who switched from soccer to track while in elementary school and credits his recent success to rap music and at least 12 hours’ sleep a day, has been called up for the longer sprint largely for experience ahead of next year’s Olympics.
Sani Brown already has one claim to fame: his 200m time of 20.34 seconds at the world youth championships broke the previous meet best held by none other than the world’s fastest man, Bolt.
Although the Jamaican’s 200m world record of 19.19 is some way off, the callow Japanese sprinter can only benefit from rubbing shoulders with track’s speed kings.
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