Jana Pittman after winning the 400m hurdles at the 2003 IAAF World Championships in Paris (© Getty Images)
Sydney, AustraliaJana Pittman will race in Devonport, Tasmania late this month in her first competition since winning the World Championship 400m Hurdles gold medal in Paris in August.
She will compete over 400m and 200m on 29-30 December in a low-key start to her Athens Olympic Games season, a pathway through Tasmania's picnic carnival well worn over the years by another golden girl, Cathy Freeman.
And Pittman has wintered well since Paris, with coach Phil King thrilled with a recent fitness trial at the Australian Institute of Sport supervised by sports scientist Esa Peltola, who is also sprinter Patrick Johnson's coach.
Using blood lactate (acid) readings to determine her recovery rate, Pittman was required to run four progressively faster 300m sprints in 46, 43, and 40 seconds, and then the last flat-out.
In fact she ran her first three repetitions faster than requested, and then unleashed a tremendous 36.37 hand-timed effort off a rolling start!
The session indicates Pittman is capable in a one-off race of destroying her own Australian national 300m record of 36.34 (automatic-timing) set at Campbelltown on February 15 last Australian summer.
“She's working the house down in training. There's been no backing off for these tests,” King told
“If she had run the last 300m in 36.9sec-high I'd have been delighted, 37.2 I'd have been satisfied but to do that, despite the type of training she's been doing, I believe it must be the strength work she's done since Paris with (Olympic weightlifter/coach) Robert Kabbas which has had such a huge impact.''
King is normally conservative and unemotional in his public statements, but when asked to assess the implications of Pittman's training form to her 400m Hurdles prospects he was forthright.
“When she does her speedwork ... (she can run) faster than anyone from anywhere has gone before,'' King declared, and she will probably have to be capable of breaking the world record to have a chance of winning gold in Athens.
“On her performance in Paris, the only Olympic Games she would have won was 1984. She will have to go significantly faster than she ran in Paris, based on Olympic history.”
“That's the plan, anyway. We both have it in our mind that it (victory at the world championships) didn't even happen. There's no softness.”
King said at the moment there are no plans for Pittman to race 400m during the Telstra A-series this Australian summer, even though the 400m sprint (not the 400m Hurdles) is scheduled at the elite Golden League meets in Europe in 2004.
“Her World Ranking of No.9 in the 400m sprint will get her into the Golden League 400m fields,'' King predicted.
“If Ana Guevara (Mexico’s World 400m champion) came out to Australia to run in our series of course Jana would jump into the 400m here this summer.''
As things stand now though, King will ask Athletics Australia competitions manager David Gynther to schedule a 300m Hurdles and 300m sprint for her at the first A-series meet in Perth on 10 January 2004 and again in Brisbane on 23 January. Her first 400m Hurdles has been pencilled in for Canberra on 30 January.