<5.05.07> - Review of Tasmanian participation in the 2007 World Athletics Tour Meeting

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13 May 2007

MEDIA RELEASE

TASIE GIRLS TASTE SUCCESS IN JAPAN
 

Melissa Kay’s dramatic call up to the Australian women’s relay team has ended in equally dramatic success at the World Athletics Tour Meeting in Osaka, Japan this afternoon (Saturday).

The grade one teacher at Table Cape Primary School, will have plenty to tell her students when she returns to school on Monday morning, having anchored the Australian quartet to a surprise second placing behind the United States and even more importantly, to a qualifying time for this year’s World Championships, in the same stadium in August.

This was the last chance the Aussie women had to achieve the entry mark of 43.90, as the times can only be achieved in a selected series of meetings, this being the final one at which an Australian team was scheduled to take part.

And achieve it they did, with Kay storming home down the final straight after slick baton changes from Sally McLellan to Fiona Cullen to Crystal Attenborough, to smash the time needed by nearly three tenths of a second - 43.62 being the fastest time by an Australian team since 2000.

It also places the Australian women in an excellent position to qualify for next year’s Beijing Olympics, where only the top sixteen nations can enter a team, based on the average of the two best times they record after 1 January 2007.

And that was not the only good news for the island state, with Commonwealth Games steeplechase bronze medallist, Donna MacFarlane venturing into relatively unfamiliar territory finishing fifth over 1500 metres and emerging with a new Tasmanian record of 4.12.22.

She now moves on to the next leg of the World Tour in Doha, Qatar on Friday where she will contest the steeple.

Osaka – 5 May 2007

Further information: Brian Roe – contact possible by email only in Japan