Big stars light up national event
Same meet, same track. Kiwi sprinting star Zoe Hobbs will be hoping lightning does strike twice when she lines up at the national athletics championships in Wellington today looking to light the fuse on her outdoor season.
Hobbs is one of seven athletes who competed at the world indoor championships in Glasgow (March 1-3) who has hurried back to line up at the national event.
Only US-based newly crowned global 1500m champion Geordie Beamish and fellow middle-distance standout Maia Ramsden, back in her final year at Harvard University, are excused duty, while high jump gold medallist Hamish Kerr is a late withdrawal.
Hobbs, who was an agonising fourth in the world indoors 60m final, and Glasgow medallists Eliza McCartney (pole vault) and Tom Walsh (shot put) are the marquee names on show in the capital, with Hobbs the only one of that group competing today when the senior schedule bounds into action. (Kerr had dispensation to give his event the swerve after his golden heroics in Scotland).
It was at the corresponding meeting, and the same Newtown track, a year ago that Hobbs blasted through to the top tier of women’s sprinting when she set a national record (11.07sec) in the heats, and then followed it up with a dazzling, but wind-assisted, 10.89 in the final.
It was, at that stage, the first time she had dipped under the 11-second barrier, and remains the fastest she has run in a race.
Hobbs did follow it up with a legal, and Oceania record, 10.97 at the Sydney Track Classic just a few weeks later and then improved that mark with 10.96 (right on the 2.0 allowable wind limit) in Switzerland last July.
The James Mortimer-trained athlete should have things her own way in what will be a straight 100m final at 5.20pm as