STOCKHOLM, Sweden, 22 February 2007 — Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia ran the third-fastest 3,000 meters indoors, winning the 15-lap race in 7 minutes, 30.51 seconds at the GE Galan athletics meet on Tuesday.
Bekele, who set a world indoor best in the 2,000 on Saturday in Birmingham, England, took the lead at 1,400 meters and set a furious pace running alone.
He was 1.5 seconds under the world-record pace with one kilometer left. But Bekele, the Olympic champion at 5,000 meters and world record-holder at 5,000 and 10,000 outdoors, couldn’t keep it up. His time was the fastest of the year and more than a second quicker than the meet record set by Bekele’s countryman Haile Gebrselassie in 1988. Daniel Komen of Kenya holds the world 3,000 mark of 7:24.90 set in 1998.
World indoor 800 champion Wilfred Bungei of Kenya and Lidia Chojecka of Poland improved their world seasonal bests in other races before a near-sellout crowd of 10,479 at the Globe Arena.
Bungei won the men’s 800 in 1:45.42 to better his previous best by three-tenths of a second. But it was more than a second off the meet record set by Yuriy Borzakovskiy of Russia in 2003.
Chojecka won the women’s 1,500 in 4:03.73 — nearly three seconds faster than her previous best this season.
Olympic champion Stefan Holm took the men’s high jump at 2.33 meters — the 101st time the Swede has cleared at least 2.30 in competition.
He failed an attempt at 2.41, two centimeters off the world record.
“It would have been fun to have cleared that height tonight,” Holm said. Hopefully I can make it in Birmingham. It’s a much more important competition.” The European Indoor Championships will be held in Birmingham on March 2-4.
Kajsa Bergqvist, a former world indoor and outdoor champion from Sweden, won the women’s high jump at 1.98.
Olympic, world and European heptathlon champion Carolina Kluft got off to a terrible start in the women’s triathlon, but the Swede held on to win the event with 2,927 points.
Kluft, voted Europe’s top female athlete for 2006, mistimed the first hurdle in the 60 hurdles and managed third in 8.64. Kluft clinched the overall victory with an impressive 400 meters, winning the last event in 53.64 seconds.
Christian Olsson, another Olympic champion from Sweden, won the men’s triple jump at 17.26, well off his world-leading result of 17.44 this season.
