Caster Semenya comes under the spotlight in Doha on Friday, hopefully for all the right reasons, as the IAAF Diamond League gets underway in Qatar.
The focus of new IAAF rules to counteract hyperandrogenism (the medical condition causing women to produce high levels of male sex hormone), while Semenya’s own focus will be on the 1500-metre event.
She races the 1,500m, a distance where she set a new Commonwealth Games and national record of 4min 00.71sec on the Gold Coast of Australia just over three weeks ago.
She’s one of five South Africans in action, the others being triple jumper Khotso Mokoena, 400m specialist Pieter Conradie, 400m hurdler Cornel Fredericks and 100m sprinter Carina Horn.
A field of 15 women are entered for the 1500m and three of them have run quicker than Semenya’s quickest, although significantly, none of them this year.
Semenya is quickest in the field this season but Kenya’s Winny Chebet has the fastest personal best at 3:59.16. The meeting record is an impressive 3:56.60, set by Sweden’s Abeba Aregawi five years ago.
The race is scheduled for 6.13pm SA time.
Mokoena is first of the South Africans in action as his event starts at 5.40pm. His personal best of 17.35m is seventh best of the field of 11.
Ten minutes before Semenya’s race, Conradie goes off in the men’s one-lapper and he’s up against a stellar field which includes Botswana’s Commonwealth gold and silver medallists, Isaac Makwala and Baboloki Thebe.
On to Horn and three-hundredths of a second might not sound like a big deal but if you’re a sprinter duelling it out against a stopwatch it could feel like forever. Maybe Horn will dip under 11 seconds on Friday.
In March, Horn set a new national record at the national championships, running 11.03. What a lot of fans might not know is that it took her three years to do so. In 2015 she equalled Evette de Klerk’s record time of 11.06 but try as she did she wasn’t able to clock faster times until now. Hopefully, it won’t take another three years to get to 11 seconds.
If ever there was a chance for her to race to a real fast time it will be in Doha as the who’s who of women’s sprinting are competing. The reigning Olympic 100m champion Elaine Thompson of Jamaica will go head to head with 200m world champion and Olympic silver medallist Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands, 2017 world silver medallist in the 100m and 200m Marie-Josee Tao Lou of the Cote D’Ivoire along with fellow country-woman 2018 World indoor champion over 60m, Murielle Ahoure.
Thompson proved unbeatable in last year’s Diamond League series as she won every single race to be crowned 2017 Diamond League Champion. She also became the first woman since Florence Griffith-Joyner at Seoul 1988 to do the sprint double at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
Rayner Schopf, who coaches Horn, said a fast time would be a bonus. ‘Carina will aim to finish amongst the top three. It’s going to be tough as she’s racing against the world’s best. If she does, it will be mission accomplished as far as I am concerned.’
Schopf reckons that should Horn achieve what she set out to do that there is a realistic chance of her clocking a time faster than 11 seconds.
According to him the injury that kept the Tuks athlete from competing at the Commonwealth Games is something of the past.
‘Her training has been going well over the last few weeks. We have been working on improving a few small things in her technique which hopefully will help enable her to be faster.’
Horn’s race is at 6.26pm and Fredericks wraps up the night from a South African perspective when he races at 6.53pm.
Patience, persistence and resilience will be Fredericks’ motto in the build-up to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The Tuks athlete admits to his form not being 100% of what it should be, but is still quietly confident of improving at least on his season’s best time of 49.63.
‘Doha is one of my favourite tracks. I think it’s going to be a good race as some of the best hurdlers are competing. It’s guaranteed to be fast. If I can race from the front, I might surprise myself. For me, the race is the proverbial ‘icebreaker’ to see where I am at the moment.
‘My main goal for the season is to dip under 49 seconds as that is what I should be running if I want to be competitive in international races. The ultimate aim will be to represent South Africa at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Luckily it’s still two years away, so I got times to sort out the last little injury niggles that are hampering me.’
Fredericks has undoubtedly been on a rollercoaster of emotional and physical ups and downs since winning gold at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
A lesser athlete would have quit a long time ago, but Fredericks is not yet ready to do so. He firmly believes he has still got a few good races left in his legs and the last thing he wants to do is to one day wonder what could have been.
‘I owe it to myself to keep on going. The goal is to push to get as close as possible to my personal best which is 48.14. I don’t have many years left in my career, and it is time to push for it.’
On current form, British Virgin Islands athlete Kyron McMaster, who won the gold medal at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, and Abderrahman Samba (Qatar) who won in a time of 47.90 in Potchefstroom should be the favourites in Doha.
Photo: Semenya in Commonwealth Games action and Fredericks and collage of Horn, by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images, Zander Erasmus and Reg Caldecott