universalsports.com reportsThe Sparkassen Cup in Stuttgart, Germany this weekend will see some of the protagonists of indoor running take center stage. But two athletes in particular, Ethiopia's Meseret Defar and Sudan's Abubaker Kaki, will hope to regain supremacy in their respective events ahead of the World Indoor Championships in Doha, Qatar in March.
Following a hugely successful 2009 indoor season, where she broke the world indoor 5000m record and improved the world best for the indoor two mile, fireworks were expected of Defar in the outdoor season. But despite a positive start that included an impressive 29:59.30 in her second ever outdoor 10,000m race, she could only manage third and fifth over the 5000m and 10,000m at the World Championships in Berlin.
"After indoors, I trained well for World Championships in Berlin," she said. "But I was so sick that I could not win. I was in a very good shape for Berlin and my result has taught me sometimes such things could happen."
It was more or less the same story for Kaki in 2009. After winning the World Indoor 800m title, Sudan's first ever global gold medal in any sport, in 2008 and breaking both the indoor and outdoor world junior records at the event, the wunderkind failed to even qualify for the World Championships final after falling in the semis.
"It was not performing in Berlin," he said. "I was ready and you can see in the heats that I was jogging [1:46]. But Brad Som tripped me in the semis and it was all over. Nothing I could do after I fall. I was surprised that the jury put others back in the race and not me. I was very shocked by their decision."
Given that the two athletes were absolute in their events, their failure to land on the top of the podium was seen as national disasters in their respective countries.
"Sudanese people were very sad after Berlin," Kaki said. "Some felt sorry for me, but some complained a lot. But this is life. You cannot please everyone. I will look ahead to a good 2010 season and learn from the past mistakes."
Looking ahead is also what Defar did right after her sub-par performance in Berlin. She returned back to competition three weeks later winning a spectacular 3000m and 5000m double at the World Athletics Final in Greece, a country she has a great affinity for since winning the Olympic 5000m title in Athens almost six years ago. Right after the competition, Defar also went on holiday in the country as she has done since 2005.
"Greece for me is like my second home town," she said. "It is a special place for me and I love it because that is my lucky place. Greeks have something different for me and I also have something different for them."
Kaki's end of season, on the other hand, was nothing close to a rest period. First, his coach Jama Aden resigned from his post as the head coach of the Sudanese national team and later took on a similar role in Qatar.
"He is still coaching me, but it is not the same," Kaki said. "It will not be the same when I was with him full time. My teammates feel the same. We are very sad. The whole of Sudan feels the same."
But after relocating his training base first to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and then now to Cairo, Egypt, Kaki is focusing on maintaining a winning record in this indoor season and defending the 800m title he won in Valencia two years ago.
"I would like to win all the meetings, but not worry about times," he said. "I want to enjoy winning. Time will come by itself. But the most important thing for me is to defend my title in Doha."
While Kaki, arguably the darling of Sudanese athletics, can be assured of a place in the small Sudan team, Defar has to negotiate a tricky path to Doha. Ethiopian selectors usually pick the top two fastest runners in each event for the Doha squad
But while Defar has run three of the fastest five times indoors over the 3000m and is a three-time world indoor champion over the event, she admits that qualifying could very well be a tough task.
"There are many great athletes in Ethiopia," she said. "So I first need to get the [qualification] minimum to think of what I have to do next. Now all I do is train well to get the minimum time that would get me in the squad."
While Stuttgart organizers hope that Defar can vigorously attack the world record time of 8:23.72 she set at the same venue in 2007, the she believes that it will be difficult for her to talk about records, especially in her first competition of the season.
"I have been away from competition for more than three months," she said. "The first race is not for you to predict your results, but a mirror you see yourself with. But I plan to have good competition. It isn't the time for me to predict my finishing time."
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