YorickBrown
06-12-04, - 01:44 PM
Source: BERGEN, Norway, CMC
Bahamian Tonique Williams-Darling announced herself as a gold medal candidate for the Athens Olympics this summer when she crushed her 400-metre field for a world-leading sub-50-second clocking at Friday's Bislett Games.
In a career-best performance, Williams-Darling accelerated impressively over the last 200 metres to clock a superb 2004 world-best 49.78 seconds, defeating her Bahamian teammate Christine Amertil by almost 15 metres on a night Turkey's Elvan Abeylegesse set a new world record. (Abeylegesse, originally from Ethiopia, decimated the women's 5,000-metre world record, which had belonged to the little known Chinese Jiang Bo since 1997 (14:28.09), improving the mark by over three seconds to 14:24.68.)
A bronze medallist at the World Indoor Championship in Budapest in March, Williams-Darling gave the Caribbean its only victory as the IAAF's TDK Golden League series began with full capacity 15,000 spectators at the refurbished Fana Stadium.
Williams-Darling with her win became the fourth fastest English-speaking Caribbean runner of all time in the event behind fellow Bahamian Pauline Davis-Thompson (49.28), and Jamaicans Lorraine Fenton (49.30) and Grace Jackson (49.57).
Bahamian Tonique Williams-Darling announced herself as a gold medal candidate for the Athens Olympics this summer when she crushed her 400-metre field for a world-leading sub-50-second clocking at Friday's Bislett Games.
In a career-best performance, Williams-Darling accelerated impressively over the last 200 metres to clock a superb 2004 world-best 49.78 seconds, defeating her Bahamian teammate Christine Amertil by almost 15 metres on a night Turkey's Elvan Abeylegesse set a new world record. (Abeylegesse, originally from Ethiopia, decimated the women's 5,000-metre world record, which had belonged to the little known Chinese Jiang Bo since 1997 (14:28.09), improving the mark by over three seconds to 14:24.68.)
A bronze medallist at the World Indoor Championship in Budapest in March, Williams-Darling gave the Caribbean its only victory as the IAAF's TDK Golden League series began with full capacity 15,000 spectators at the refurbished Fana Stadium.
Williams-Darling with her win became the fourth fastest English-speaking Caribbean runner of all time in the event behind fellow Bahamian Pauline Davis-Thompson (49.28), and Jamaicans Lorraine Fenton (49.30) and Grace Jackson (49.57).