Reuters/Raleigh, North Carolina

In the end, Allyson Felix went with the World Championship event that presented her with the biggest challenge.
Eligible to compete in either the 200 metres, the 400 metres or both in Beijing, the American sprinter chose the longer event and two relays.
“She loves the 200,” her coach, Bob Kersee, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “But with all due respect to everybody else, in the 200 she has won on centre stage in both the World Championship and the Olympic Games.”
Felix won the world title over the half-lap in 2005, 2007 and 2009 and is the reigning Olympic champion after her London triumph.
The 29-year-old’s only global medal in the 400, however, is the silver she won at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, where she did attempt the 200-400 double and also took home a bronze from the 200 and two golds from the relays.
“So I think at this stage,” Kersee said, stressing the words were his, not Felix’s.
“If I am going to try something different, and put a little bit of athletic pressure on myself, moving up to the 400 will be the bigger challenge versus saying I got everything to win or everything to lose by running the 200.”
The coach floated the idea of a 200-400 double in Beijing but Felix eventually decided against it because a crushing schedule leaves only an hour between the 200 semi-final and the 400 final.
But there is no doubt about her target for next year’s Rio Olympics.
“I would love to run the double,” Felix, who has won 17 global medals since turning professional as a California teenager in 2003, told reporters in Lausanne this summer. “So I would hope that, moving forward, that the Olympic schedule would reflect that.”
It does not at the moment, with the 400 final just 75 minutes after the first round of the 200. “To me, it’s really disappointing because there are so many people who can do a 200-400 double, and I think that we should be allowed to attempt it,” said Felix.
Kersee is even more vocal in his opinion that the scheduling is an error by the IAAF and Olympic officials.
“If they look back at past history, they should ask themselves why are we denying somebody to do the two and the four that we allowed to happen before?” the coach said, referring to double victories by American Michael Johnson and France’s Marie-José Pérec at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
“I hope if they are stupid enough to make a mistake, they are smart enough to make a correction.”   (Editing by Nick Mulvenney and Greg Stutchbury)

Abeylegesse among positive dope tests

DPA/Berlin

Turkish long-distance runner Elvan Abeylegesse is one of the 28 athletes whose revisited samples have tested positive for doping, the Turkish Athletic Federation said yesterday. According to the federation, Abeylegesse has been asked by athletics governing body IAAF to provide a defence regarding positive samples from 2007, the year she won the silver medal in the 10,000 metres at the World Championships in Osaka, Japan.
Abeylegesse has not had her silver medal withdrawn but this is the likely eventual outcome should she be found guilty of doping. This would lead to others having their results improved with Briton Jo Pavey moving up to the bronze medal position.
“Elvan Abeylegesse rumour now confirmed by Turkish federation,” Pavey tweeted. “My emotions are all over the place. Thank you for all the nice messages.”
The IAAF said on Tuesday that 28 athletes had submitted 32 adverse findings in doping retests of samples from the 2005 and 2007 worlds. That announcement came as the IAAF is under fire over allegedly not dealing properly with doping, drawing attention from the sporting aspect of the next World Championships due August 22-30 in Beijing.
German TV network ARD and British newspaper the Sunday Times reported that a leaked IAAF database with 12,000 blood tests from around 5,000 runners suggests that a third of medallists in endurance events at Olympics and worlds between 2001 and 2012 had suspicious readings.
Abeylegesse, now 32, was quoted in Turkish media as denying doping and said she will not compete until she has been cleared. She also asked for her samples from the 2008 Olympic Games, where she won silver in both the 5,000m and 10,000m, to be retested as well.
The IAAF said that none of the concerned athletes was to compete in China at the Beijing worlds.
In 2013 the IAAF revealed that six athletes (four from Belarus and two from Russia) were caught doping at the Helsinki 2005 worlds via retests of samples, and that nine athletes overall had been sanctioned via retests.
A second round of retests at the laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, revealed the latest adverse findings after the time period for restesting was increased from eight years to 10.