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| French sprinter Myriam Soumaré will double up over 100m and 200m at the IAAF World Championships in Daegu this summer. |
French sprinter Myriam Soumaré and Véronique Mang have confirmed that they both want to double up over 100m and 200m at this summer’s IAAF World Championships in Daegu, South Korea.
The pair both won medals at the 2010 European Athletics Championships in Barcelona. Soumaré took the 200m gold and 100m bronze while Mang finished second in the 100m before being disqualified for false-starting in the 200m final.
The pair added to their medal collection when they ran the first two legs in the 4x100m final in which France won the silver medals.
Soumaré, 24, recently returned to France after a 10-day training stint in Caribbean, which helped her get over finishing a slightly disappointing seventh over 60m at European Athletics Indoor Championships in Paris last month, a race won by Ukraine’s Oleysa Povh.
She can boast of bests of 11.18 and 22.32, both set when winning her medals in Barcelona, but her coach Hubert Rochard believes that these will be reduced this summer.
“I think she will also be consistent around the times that were her peak last year,” commented Rochard.
By contrast, the 26-year-old Mang - who finished one place in front of her compatriot in Paris and has a 100m best of 11.11 - has stayed at home in Eaubonne in the last month.
More emphasis will placed on the 200m this year; with Mang and her coach Olivier Marchand looking for a big reduction in her best time of 22.92, which she ran when she was still a teenager in 2004.
“I think she should be down to around 22.50 by the time of the French Championships in July,” Marchand told the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.
Both women are also likely to feature in the French team that will contest the SPAR European Team Championships in Stockholm on 18-19 July.
Mang won the 100m at last year’s event in Bergen, Norway, to give her team 12 valuable points en-route to France finishing fourth in 2010.
Another of France’s Barcelona heroes, triple gold medallist and 2010 European Athlete of the Year Christophe Lemaitre, started the season by supporting his club and notching up a comfortable 10.19 win over 100m at a local meeting in Aix-les-Bains on Saturday.
He also ran the second leg on his club’s 4x100m team that won in 40.08.