Daniel Batman ( AUS) running in Birmingham - 2 March 2003 (© Getty Images)
Two years ago at the last World Indoor Championships in Lisbon, Daniel Caines was the star of the British team, winning the men’s 400m (46.40), and bringing home Britain’s only gold medal of those championships.
Currently, Caines stands as favourite to retain his title, and is the only British athlete to hold a 2003 world season’s lead - 45.75 - in any of the championship events which will be contested at the 9th IAAF World Indoor Championships in Athletics (Friday 14 March – Sunday 16 March), on Daniel Caines’ home turf of Birmingham, England.
But in 400m running this winter another “Daniel” has emerged, in the shape of Australia’s Daniel Batman who has set a 45.93 Area record. He is ready to contest Caines’ right to the World Indoor crown in the ‘Lion’s Den’ of 400m which is what Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena, the venue for the championships, will become next week.
Significantly, both men’s seasonal bests have been set on the World Indoor Championships track, Caines’ 45.75 at the Norwich Union Grand Prix meet on 21 February, and Batman’s 45.93 on 2 March at the British Championships.
The situation presumably couldn’t be more galling for Caines. You spend all winter getting ready to defend your World Indoor crown in your home city. You get to the top of the world performance list with no obvious rival in sight. And then what happens? Batman comes flying out of the blue, and throws down the gauntlet.
Like the rest of the track and field world, Daniel Caines now knows that Daniel Batman is making more than just a name for himself.
Caines missed the British trials at the National Indoor Arena last weekend to avoid the risk of aggravating a sore hamstring. In his absence, the ‘guest’ Batman made a major impact, in what was his first experience of indoor competition.
Just a week earlier he had improved his outdoor personal best to 45.02 in Canberra and, despite the exertion of a 24-hour midweek flight to Britain, he ran 46.77sec in his heat and 46.40sec in his semi-final. The latter performance was a 0.05sec improvement on the Australian record Darren Clark set behind Butch Reynolds and Sunday Bada at the 1993 World Indoor Championships in Toronto.
It was clear to the aficionados in attendance that the squat, musclar Batman was ideally suited to indoor 400m running - very much in the manner of the British specialists Jamie Baulch and Todd Bennett. It was even clearer the following day as the former Australian schools rugby union centre powered to victory in the final, clocking 45.93.
Only Caines has run quicker indoors this year. Batman, though, can be expected to go even faster - with more indoor experience, more closely-matched competition, and more words of inspiration from Darren Clark.
It is not by coincidence that the young Australian runs with the same attacking verve as the man who led the Olympic 400m final as a 19-year-old in Los Angeles in 1984 before finishing tantalising out of the medals in fourth place, the position he again filled in Seoul four years later. Batman is coached by Craig Hilliard at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra but gains much of his motivation from the mentoring role Clark has come to perform with him.
“Darren's probably the reason I started running in the first place,” Batman says. “I remember when I was eight years old, going down to the track and watching him run. He really got me into it, by inspiring me. He talks a bit like Rocky to me, just motivating me. He said to me last weekend, 'just seize the moment'.”
Batman certainly did that and Caines' World title could be next in his grasp. The pair have met before. They both ran the second leg in the 4 x 400m relay at the IAAF World Junior Championships in Annecy in 1998. Batman helped the Australian team to victory; Caines and the British quartet finished fifth.
Two years later they were both in the individual 400m at the Sydney Olympics. Caines reached the semi-finals; Batman was left hamstrung after 150m of his first round heat.
Caines' junior by two years, the teenage Olympian had a brief dalliance with rugby, as a member of the ACT Brumbies squad. As he approaches his 22nd birthday, though, he is back on track as a quarter-miler, starting to live up to his name - and to the Batman logo tattooed on his right arm.
“My father always told me it was a prestigious thing to have Batman as my name,” he says. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Batman, the man who founded Melbourne. I'm proud of the Batman name, so I put the logo on my arm.”
“I'm also a Batman fan, I guess. I always watch the Batman movies before I run, just to get motivated.”
Daniel - Daniel John Batman - was born in Melbourne but has settled in Canberra with Nova Peris, the woman who beat Cathy Freeman to the distinction of becoming the first Aborigine to win an Olympic gold medal, as a member of the victorious Australian women's hockey team in Atlanta in 1996, and who succeeded Freeman as Commonwealth 200m champion in 1998.
The couple have an eleven-month-old daughter called Destiny. As for the destiny of the World Indoor 400m crown in Birmingham on 16 March, that could just as well go to the emerging Australian as to the home town title-holder.
“Daniel Caines is the favourite,” Batman says, “because he's the reigning champion. I'm glad that all the pressure's on him. I guess I've got nothing to lose. I'm just going to go out there and I'm going to fly,” which is what you would expect of Batman, naturally!
Simon Turnbull for the IAAF
