Two-time women’s 800m Olympic champions, three-time 800m world champion and a double Commonwealth Games middle distance gold medallist Caster Semenya Finished sixth in 5,000m at the African championships yesterday (Thursday,9 June 2022), which ends the road to the next months’ world champs in Eugene.
The 2022 World Athletics Championships, will be the eighteenth edition of the World Athletics Championships, they are scheduled to be held in 2022 in Eugene, Oregon, the United States from July 15–24, 2022. It will mark the first time the U.S host a Sporting event of such magnitude. The World Atletic Championships have showcased the greatest talents on Earth since 1983.
This marks her first international competitive race for the republic since the 2018 Commonwealth Games where her performance was remarkable and won the 800 and 1500m, Semenya clocked 16min 03.24sec, well off the 15:10.00 mark required for selection for the Eugene worlds.
Thirteen years ago, Caster Semenya arrived at the African Junior Athletics Championships in Mauritius as a teenager no one had heard of. This week, she returns for the senior version of the championships – as one of the most recognisable figures in sport https://t.co/W1IOxoN2AE. pic.twitter.com/kLCyDsqNeP
— City Press (@City_Press) June 8, 2022
It is not all over and done for the athlete as time is not on her side, Semenya has just five weeks before the 15-24 July worlds in which to try to get the qualifying time. Her personal best is 15:31.50, set in April this year. Kenya’s Beatrice Chebet won the race in the Cote d’Or National Sports Complex in St Pierre, Mauritius, at 15:00.82 ahead of Belayneh Azale of Ethiopia.
The three-time world champion over 800m, was involuntarily subjected to change her favored distance to the longer distance due to gender admissibility rules that required her to take testosterone-reducing drugs to compete in a race. Testosterone is a sex hormone that plays important role in the body. In men, it’s thought to regulate sex drive (libido), bone mass, fat distribution, muscle mass and strength, and the production of red blood cells and sperm. A small amount of circulating testosterone is converted to estradiol, a form of estrogen.
Semenya who took the world by storm when she became a world champion at the tender age of 18 years in Berlin in 2009 has made several unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn the ruling. She even dropped her favorite race to half (200m) to try to find the expression to participate in the Tokyo Olympics but that attempt was also unsuccessfully.
Ferdinand Omanyala is now the fastest man and in Africa, the Kenyan sprinter was crowned the new African men’s 100m champion, after beating defending champion Akani Simbine of South Africa in a photo-finish.
“I never knew it was going to be hard like that, Akani is a great and experienced sprinter. Competing with him gave me the motivation to work even harder and push even more. In my mind, I thought at 90 meters I could be way ahead of the rest, but he was still with me. It was all about composure and just getting through the line, It is the first time I experienced waiting [looking] at the board for the results, but thank God the result is what we wanted.” said Omanyala. Simbine was three-hundredths of a second behind Omanyala for the second time this year.
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