PARIS, 26 December 2005 — The world championships in a rain-swept Helsinki marked a year during which a new generation of athletes usurped the older guard.
The youngsters are best personified by the likeable trio of American sprinter Justin Gatlin, Ethiopian runner Kenenisa Bekele and Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, the latter two voted 2005 athletes of the year by the world athletics governing body, the IAAF, for the second year running. It was a stellar year for Gatlin, who followed up on his Olympic 100m gold in Athens with a two-medal haul in the World Championships in a rain-swept Helsinki.
In the absence of world record holder Asafa Powell through injury, Gatlin destroyed his rivals in the 100m and 200m, and would surely have emulated fading American sprint legend Maurice Greene had the US team not dropped the baton in the heats of the 4x100m relay.
Ethiopian running phenomenon Bekele rebounded from the death earlier this year of his fiancée Alem Techale from a suspected heart attack to retain his 10,000m title in Helsinki. The 23-year-old, also the Olympic 10,000m champion and four-time double world cross country champion, then broke his own 10km world record by more than two seconds in the Golden League meet in Brussels.
Bekele’s counterpart Tirunesh Dibaba, 19, also set the women’s distance running alight, becoming the first woman to achieve the 5,000m and 10,000m double. Another athlete to have let her performances do the talking was Isinbayeva, who won the world title with a world record vault of 5.01m. The 23-year-old broke her own world record nine times this year, and she looks so far ahead of her competitors that her dominance seems set to last for a long while to come. Elsewhere, there were other Americans to take up Gatlin’s rallying cry in Helsinki in the form of 21-year olds Lauryn Williams winning the 100m and 4x100m relay, and Jeremy Wariner in the men’s 400m.
