The 2011 IAAF Athletics World Championships Start Today

The 2018 Winter Olympics wasn't the only major international sporting event the Koreans grabbed.   Another one they successfully bid for and won was the 2011 IAAF World Championships that start in Daegu today and run through September 4.

Athletics is what the rest of the world calls track and field, and the Monaco based International Association of Athletics Federations is the governing body of the sport.  The championships are held biennially so they don't step on the prestige of the Olympics being the ultimate event in the sport of athletics. 

The next IAAF World Championships will take place in Moscow from August 10-18, 2013 and in Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium in 2015.

In the IAAF worlds all the sports we know and love from the sprint and distance races to the field events will be contested by men and women international teams in Daegu.

Yes, they'll be passing gold, silver and bronze medals out too.  They'll also be televised by many networks around the globe, including Universal cable here in the States which concentrates on Olympic and international sports.     

Speaking of the Olympics, since we are less than a year away from the 2012 London Games, by watching the championships being contested here,  we fans of the sport will get some of our things that make you go hmm questions answered leading up to the Olympic athletics competition next summer from August 3-12.

Who are the up and coming athletes in the sport?  What athletes that we have seen over the last few years that we thought were done are making comebacks?   Will the athletes who are having stellar seasons this year continue their winning ways and parlay that season long excellence into world championship medals?  

Conversely, will the athletes who were having a subpar year suddenly take inspiration from being on the big international sporting stage and put it together?  What athlete who wasn't on the world's horizons will have the breakthrough performance that makes them an international household name and a potential medal favorite in London? 

Is Jamaica's Usain Bolt still the world's fastest man?  Can Caster Semenya overcome the drama she's undergone since her surprise 800m championship win in Berlin in 2009 and defend her title?

In Caster's case, I sure hope so.

The answers to those sporting questing question will be revealed as the 2011 edition of the IAAF world championships gets started

Caster Semenya To Tackle 1500m As Well

The London Olympics will be taking place next summer, and 2009 800m world champion Caster Semenya of South Africa has decided she will attempt to go for the gold in the 1500m as well.

"I'm going for my second successive gold medal in Daegu in August," she said to the Guardian. "This will also be part of my preparations for the 2012 London Olympics. I'm looking forward to my first Olympics and the plan is to include the 1500 meters."

She's prepping for the 2011 World Championships by  not only running races in her homeland, but an upcoming May 28 event in Dakar, Senegal and the Nike Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, OR on June 4.  

The Nike Prefontaine event will be a major test as to whether Semenya is close to being back to her championship level form that shocked the world in Berlin.       

The 2011  IAAF World Championships will be held in Daegu, Korea from August 27-September 4.   I'm  hoping that after all the unnecessary drama she was put through she not only wins gold at Daegu, but I hope she does the same next summer in London as well.

Semenya Skipping Commonwealth Games.

This star crossed edition of the Commonwealth Games has its opening ceremonies in Delhi, India today, but there will be one well known athlete who organizers and others were hoping would bring some star power to the event that won't be coming.

2009 800m world champion Caster Semenya won't be part of the South African team for these games.  She's staying home to deal with a back problem.

She stated that she'd been having serious lower back pain and had not been comfortable during her last few races. 

The South African sports authorities want to save her for more high profile events such as the 2011 IAAF Athletics World Championships and the London Olympics.

"It would serve no purpose to have an athlete in Delhi who was struggling with any sort of injury that would compromise performance and it is our medical view that physically and emotionally she would not be capable of doing justice to her talent at an event of this magnitude," said Team South Africa's Chief Medical Officer Shuaib Majra.

 While it would have been nice to see you run and win in Delhi, the 2011 IAAF Championships and the 2012 Games are the bigger prize.    Get well and hope to see you kicking butt and taking names in the world's various meets soon.

If Semenya Looked This, Y'all Wouldn't Be Hatin'

This is Czech runner and 1980 Moscow Games 400m silver medalist Jarmila Kratochvilova, the current 800m world record holder.

She entered the 800m at a July 26, 1983 meet in Munich, Germany as a training exercise and the rest is history. Her time of 1:53.28 in that race not only smashed the then world record of 1:53.43 held by Russia's Nadezhda Olisarenko, it is currently the oldest world athletics record on the books.

One of the things that has pissed me off in this whole Caster Semenya saga since it started last year is the undercurrent of bigotry and the denigration of her femininity by the vanilla flavored peanut gallery.

Some of the haters throwing 'that's a man' shade at Semenya within the 800m world damned sure wouldn't be on the modeling catwalks themselves or on the stage competing for their nations in the Miss Universe pageant.

But let's get to the crux of what I suspect is some of the motivation behind the hatin' on this talented 19 year old South African runner.

There has been a long line of African descended female sprinters since the 60's that have come over time to dominate the sprint races (the 100m, 100m hurdles, 200m, 400m, 400m hurdles, the 4X100 and 4x400 relays) in what the world calls athletics.

They have also etched their names into the sports record books. The next oldest world record held by a woman is Flo-Jo's blistering 10.49 100m time she set in Indianapolis during the US Olympic trials in 1988,

In the long distance races such as the 3000m steeplechase, 5000m, 10,000m and the marathon, those are increasingly either being dominated by eastern African runners and Asian runners or the European dominance of them is being challenged.

Now that challenge to European dominance is happening in the middle distance races such as the 800m and 1500m.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics the medals in that race were all won by runners from African nations, with Pamela Jelimo of Kenya taking the gold.

Want to guess who was the person Semenya passed in August 2009 to become the fifth fastest 800m runner of all time?

Pamela Jelimo.

Now a young runner from South Africa comes along seemingly out of nowhere like Pamela Jelimo did in 2008 to win the 2009 world championship in the event. Factor in that Semenya has three years to improve on that time, she's of African descent and has non standard feminine presentation, and let the 'unwoman' hate flow.

But peep another picture of Kratochvilova from back in the day. Sure didn't hear much 'that's a man' shade coming from the vanilla flavored peanut gallery at the time.

No clamor to have Kratochvilova immediately slapped in stirrups and subjected to a humiliating and invasive 'gender verification' examination. No enduring an 11 month competition ban as your competitors gleefully denigrated your gender presentation in front of rolling television cameras.

Nope, don't recall that happening.

It's why I'm hoping that Semenya not only breaks that 800m world record, it would be even sweeter if she did so while snatching the gold medal in London two years from now.

Peeps Still Hatin' on Semenya

For the first time since she was reinstated by the IAAF to compete, South African 800m world champion Caster Semenya faced world class competition in her event.

On Sunday she ran her third race since she was was forced to sit out 11 months to undergo gender verification testing at the behest of the IAAF after running the fifth fastest 800m time for a woman in last year's World Championships.

She returned to the scene of last year's triumph in Berlin and showed little effects from the alleged HRT she's undergoing and lack of elite level competition. She won the race by closing a 20 meter gap down the homestretch to win in 1:59:90.



But her competitors are still chomping Hater Tots and drinking Hateraid Fierce from 55 gallon drums.

British runner Jemma Simpson, who finished fourth in this race, let loose in a Telegraph interview.

"It's obviously a human rights issue but human rights affect everyone in the race, not just one person," Simpson said. "The rest of the field just gets ignored. No way is it a personal issue but it's a debate about what is right and fair for everyone. It's a really tough subject and a lot of people are very careful about what they say. You have to be.

"You have to be diplomatic and keep your opinions to yourself but sometimes it is so frustrating."

Canadian runner Diane Cummins plied on in her interviews comments.

"Unfortunately for Caster, she's grown up in an environment that is complicated not just for her but for human science. Basically, is she man, is she lady? What constitutes male, what constitutes female?"

"Even if she is a female, she's on the very fringe of the normal athlete female biological composition from what I understand of hormone testing. So, from that perspective, most of us just feel that we are literally running against a man."

"It is certainly frustrating to be running against someone who seems to be doing it effortlessly. We all believe that Caster Semenya, pushed to her full potential, could break the world record.

Well, lets see what her family has to say.

Semenya's grandmother said in a BBC interview last year, "I know she’s a woman – I raised her myself. If you go at my home village and ask any of my neighbors, they would tell you that Mokgadi (Semenya's given name) is a girl. They know because they helped raise her. People can say whatever they like but the truth will remain, which is that my child is a girl. I am not concerned about such things."

Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley, who attempted to become the first trans Olympian ever in 2008, is a co-founder of the Coalition of Athletes for Inclusion in Sport. She said the 19-year-old runner’s gender should never have been in question and blasted Cummins.

“She’s ignorant,” Worley said. “You’ve got a bunch of athletes who are women who are upset because they’re not running fast enough. It’s bad sportsmanship, that’s what this is. … It’s totally sour grapes.”

Worley took aim at the gender based performance double standard vis a vis Usain Bolt and Caster Semenya.

“Basically when Usain shows up, it’s a question of who’s going to be second and third. That’s a given,” she said. “We make him king of the day. We make him world champion. We the media, we society say ‘Usain, go faster, show us what you can do.’

“But when a woman does it, who didn’t actually set a world record (in winning at the Berlin worlds last year), who (more than 10) women have run faster than her, who didn’t set a meet record, we throw her into stirrups and virtually rape her. We did that because of the way her face looks and her voice.”

I agree and have said it since this controversy broke out last year. It's sour grapes tinged with transphobic bigotry.

Just win, Caster. The London Games are only two years away.