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| Pole vault queen Yelena Isinbayeva will start her indoor season at the Russian Winter meet in Moscow. |
With her eyes firmly set on the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Paris, Russian Pole Vault star Yelena Isinbayeva is ready to make a comeback at next month’s Russian Winter meet in Moscow.
The two-time Olympic champion and World record holder will end a ten-month sabbatical from the sport in the Russian capital on 6 February.
“I am motivated, healthy and very pleased with my condition at this stage in my training. My coach, Vitaliy Petrov, and I have spent a lot of time working on the basics of our training programme to give me a solid base. So I am very happy to get back into competition and do what I enjoy the most,' Isinbayeva told iaaf.org.
“I will start in Moscow, and then compete in Donetsk at Sergey Bubka's Pole Vault All-Stars meeting and possibly one or two competitions before the European Athletics Indoors Championships in Paris.”
The 2011 European Athletics Indoor Championships will be held at the Palais Omnisport Paris-Bercy in the French capital between 4-6 March.
In addition to her back-to-back Olympic triumphs in 2004 and 2008, she has five world titles (2 outdoor and 3 indoor) and two European titles (1 indoor and 1 outdoor) to her credit. Over the years Isinbayeva has amassed a collection of 27 world records - 15 outdoors; 12 indoors; 17 overall. Both of her current world records, 5.06m outdoors and 5.00m indoors, were set in 2009.
However the 28-year-old decided to take a break from the sport after a pair of back-to-back sub-par performances – first at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin where she no-heighted, and again at last year’s World Indoor Championships in Doha, where she finished fourth.
Isinbayeva had opened her 2010 season at the Moscow Winter meeting, clearing 4.85m, her season’s best and the highest indoor leap of the year.