Cape Town – Double Olympic champion Caster Semenya won a 3 000m race in a personal best time of eight minutes and 54.97 seconds on Wednesday as she eyes qualifying for the 5 000m at the 2022 world championships.
She knocked almost 10 seconds off her previous best 3 000m time when winning the Athletics South Africa Grand Prix Series event at a blustery Greenpoint Stadium in Cape Town.
The qualifying time for the world championships 5,000m in the American city of Eugene is 15:10.00 and Semenya is hopeful of making the cut.
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“I am there or thereabouts,” she told reporters after her victory. “If it happens, then it happens.”
The South African is unable to compete in her favourite 800m – the distance in which she achieved Olympic glory and world records – because she refuses to take testosterone-reducing drugs.
World Athletics bar women athletes with high testosterone levels from competing in races between 400m and a mile, because the governing body says the hormone increases muscle mass and oxygen uptake.
Semenya has made several unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn the ruling.
Defending the ban, World Athletics boss Sebastian Coe said “there is 10 years of solid science that underpins the regulations”.
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Source: AFP
Picture: Twitter/@Mpumzijozana
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