NICOLA SANDERS produced a sensational personal best to win the women’s 400 metres at the Norwich Union AAA Championships in Sheffield yesterday and lay down her marker as one of the favourites for the 400 metres hurdles gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne next month.
The 400 metres flat is still an unfamiliar event for Sanders, 23, whose previous best at the distance was 51.95sec outdoors. But she smashed the championship best in her semi-final on Saturday and then powered home in 50.72 to win yesterday. It was the second-fastest 400 metres time by a British athlete indoors — only Katharine Merry has run faster.
Both Sanders and her coach, Tony Lester, were shocked at the time, which is the fourth fastest 400 metres in the world this year.
Sanders will leave for a training camp in Sydney on Friday brimming with confidence. She ran 55.61 to win the 400 metres hurdles at AAA Championships outdoors last year, but on this form she could be looking at 54 seconds or less. It looked as if she might have gone off too fast as she passed 200 metres in 23.68, but she showed impressive strength.
“I thought I might run 51, but I wasn’t expecting that, to take over a second off my best and indoors is a bit crazy,” Sanders said. “I might be able to get down to 54 (outdoors), but the hurdles are so different. We’ve had to do speed work a lot earlier this year. I was ranked ninth in the Commonwealth last year, but it’s such a funny time of year, you don’t know how people are running.”
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It was not the fairytale final everyone had been expecting in the women’s 800 metres as Karen Harewood suffered the disappointment of being caught on the line.
Jenny Meadows chased Harewood down on the home straight to win a photo finish and her third AAA Championship 800 metres title in a personal best of 2min 2.41sec. Harewood, one one-hundreth of a second behind, paid for trying to win from the front.
Meadows secured the automatic qualification for the World Indoor Championships in Moscow, but Harewood will probably be selected, too. “I’m gutted, gutted, completely gutted,” Harewood said. “It is disappointing when you know you can run two minutes.”