In the latest episode of IAAF Inside Athletics, European 4x400m champions Jonathan, Kevin and Dylan Borlee of Belgium talk about their life as one of the leading families in athletics.
“I stay very cool,” says Jacques Borlee, the creator of one of the great dynasties in athletics. “I know my sons, so when I watch them compete I know they’re able to control stress. I’m never nervous.”
The 4x400m is the traditional closing event for many meetings worldwide, and for good reason. The distance is long enough to be uncomfortable for pure sprinters and draw in some middle-distance runners, short enough to demand total effort above tactics, and tremendously dramatic, even among other relays.
The world’s two best 400m runners headline another loaded field in Eugene on 31 May at the 40th Prefontaine Classic, the third leg of the 2014 IAAF Diamond League, as world champion LaShawn Merritt takes on Olympic champion Kirani James.
The Borlee brothers are perhaps the most famous twins in athletics at the moment, and the 400m runners are set to make history at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow.
This year, all three Borlee brothers will be lining up in the same event at the Belgacom Memorial Van Damme, the IAAF Diamond League final in Brussels on 6 September.
Kirani James will be looking to follow up his sizzling world-leading time of 44.02 achieved at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Shanghai two weeks ago when goes to his marks at the next stop in the 2013 series, the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene this coming Saturday (1).
Italian high jumper Alessia Trost won a highly awaited High Jump competition against Belgium’s 2008 Olympic Games champion Tia Hellebaut while Czech Republic’s Pavel Maslak and Ireland’s Brian Gregan were just two of the overseas stars who shone at the Flanders Indoor meeting, an IAAF Indoor Permit Meeting, in Gent on Sunday (10).
There aren’t many track and field duels more symbolic than the one between Tia Hellebaut and Alessia Trost that will unfold on Sunday (10) in Gent at the Flanders Indoor, an IAAF Indoor Permit meeting.