The World Indoor Series Final in Birmingham

Stuart Weir was in the house in Birmingham, England, one of my favorite arenas in the world! Here is his first story for the Birmingham Worl Indoor Tour Final 

The World Indoor Series Final in Birmingham

The World Indoor Series Final in Birmingham delivered a high-quality program from beginning to end with nine Indoor champions crowned, two British records achieved, and a few near-miss record attempts. Then there was the men’s 60m race which only got underway after three athletes were DQed in two false starts. And there were enough stellar performances by the stars of British Athletics – Dina, Laura, Keely, etc – to send the home crowd home happy. 

Winners of the different disciples were calculated from overall performances during the year – not the winner takes all of the Diamond League Final.  The winners were:

Women

60m  Aleia Hobbs  

800m Keely Hodgkinson

3000m Lemlem Hailu

Pole Vault Alysha Newman

Men

400m Jereem Richards

1500m Neil Gourley

60H Grant Holloway

High Jump Hamish Kerr

Long Jump Tobias Montler

The unluckiest loser was Dina Asher-Smith who had the same amount of points as Aleia Hobbs but was awarded second place on countback.

The prestigious RunBlogRun awards are Presented as follows: 

Best disguise: Marquis Dendy

Photographed with most other athletes: Grant Holloway

Most ingenious selfie: Asha Philip

Going back to those almost records, Gudaf Tsegay’s 8:16.69 fell just nine-hundredths of a second short of the world indoor 3000m record of 8:16.60 set by her compatriot Genzebe Dibaba in Stockholm in 2014.

Keely Hodgkinson ran a British record of 1:57.18 being her own 800m record but felt short of the woman record which was amazingly set by Jolanda Ceplak on the day Hodgkinson was born almost 21 years ago

Britain’s Olympic 1500m silver medallist Laura Muir was attacking Maria Mutola’s 2:30.94 set in 1999. On pace in the first half of the race, the lights started to move away from Muir a short while after and she had to be satisfied with the win in 2:34.53.