600 athletes from 130 countries in Lisbon
for World Indoors
$90,000 showdown between Dragila (USA) and Feofonova (RUS)
5 March 2001 - Monte Carlo - Lisbon’s Atlantic Pavilion will be home from 9-11 March of the 8th IAAF World Indoor Championships in Athletics, to be contested by six hundred athletes from over 130 countries.
This massive level of participation, just five months after the Sydney Olympics, is proof of the importance of the indoor season to the athletics movement world-wide. Just a few years ago the number of participants was much more limited. In Lisbon, alongside many Olympic medallists, world champions and record holders, there will be a lot of emerging young talents: and this could well prove to be the focal point of this first major athletics rendezvous of the new millennium.
There will be another innovation in this World Championships in Portugal: the IAAF cash awards, introduced in 1997, will be paid to the first six placed athletes in the individual competitions, as opposed to the first three as was previously the case. Winners will receive $40,000, 2nd place $20,000, $10,000 to 3rd, $8,000 to 4th, $6,000 to 5th and $4,000 to the sixth place. The same awards will apply to the relay events.
Any athlete establishing a new world record during the Championships will receive a $50,000 record bonus.
The possibility of winning this bonus looks to be very much on the cards in the women’s pole vault. This event, which was first introduced at the 1997 World Indoors in Paris, will, according to the IAAF Rules, attract a full bonus for the first time in Lisbon (in the previous two stagings, in Paris and Maebashi, the possible awards were, respectively, 50% and 75%). The event is also shaping up to be one of the most exciting and closely-fought, with the winner likely to take home, in addition to the gold medal, a cheque for $90,000.
Spectators will be able to follow the head-to-head between the current world record holder - with 4.70m - Olympic champion Stacy Dragila, who won in Paris ‘97 with 4.40m and became world champion outdoors in Seville last year with 4.60m and the upcoming young rising star from Russia, Svetlana Feofonova, with a recent European record of 4.65m.
The two will also be facing stiff competition from Anzhela Balakhonova (UKR), Kellie Suttle (USA), Pavla Hamackova (CZE) and Yvonne Buschbaum (GER).
