| Lapierre feels his destiny is to be longest |
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By DAN SILKSTONE The Age April 14, 2010 IT'S A long way to the top in the sport of long jumping but recently crowned world indoor champion Fabrice Lapierre believes he is headed there 10 centimetres at a time. The Texas-based jumper, who claimed gold at last month's indoor championships in Doha, has grown in confidence from that win, predicting yesterday that he would soon break Jai Taurima's 10-year-old national record of 8.49 metres en route to Commonwealth Games gold. "I'm confident this year that I'm going to break the Australian record, I'm pretty sure I'll break it," he said. "I'm looking at jumping over 8.5 metres this year and probably 8.6 metres and that's going to be one of the top marks in the world and in history, so it's just a matter of time before I do that and when I do it it'll be there." Lapierre, who said he envisaged jumping 8.70 in the lead-up to the London Olympics, will be competing at the national championships in Perth on Friday. He will be hot favourite to win the event due to the injury-enforced absence of world championship bronze medallist Mitchell Watt, missing with an adductor problem. The young Queenslander beat Lapierre into fourth place at the Berlin world championships. Australia now has two of the world's top jumpers and both predicted they would fight it out for gold at October's Commonwealth Games, despite the presence of South African Khotso Mokoena, who took silver in Berlin. "Fabrice is the one I look to as the one I know I'm going to have to beat," said Watt yesterday. "If there's one thing I learnt from Europe last year it's that he always manages to pull out a huge jump." Watt, who is regarded as the quickest Australian long jumper of all time, also predicted yesterday that he would run 100 metres in 10 seconds flat this year, which would rank in Australia only behind Patrick Johnston. |