September 22, 2007	Saturday	Ramazan 09, 1428

STUTTGART (Germany), Sept 21: The World Athletics Final is a US$3 million season-ending party — with an extra US$100,000 thrown in for every world record.

Asafa Powell, Yelena Isinbayeva and Blanka Vlasic should take note. It might come in handy on Saturday.

Powell ran a world record 9.74 seconds in the 100 metres at the Rieti Grand Prix two weeks ago — and he eased up in the final metres. The Jamaican has been waiting for ideal weather conditions ever since to shave another three-hundredths of a second off his mark.

With mostly sunny weather and temperatures as high as 24C (75F) in the forecast, this might be the moment many have been waiting for.

Powell won’t be facing Tyson Gay, who won the 100 and 200 at the world championships in Osaka, Japan, but isn’t running in Europe at the moment.

Over two days starting Saturday, most of the best performers in every discipline will meet in 36 straight finals, the last chance for some bragging rights going into an Olympic year.

Even if some greats won’t be in Stuttgart, there is plenty of depth around to make it one of the best meets of the year. Each winner will earn US$30,000.

It will be one of the last opportunities for Isinbayeva to set an outdoor pole vault world record this year, hoping to end a two-year drought.

The Russian’s new technique has her winning meets, but she remains 10 centimetres (four inches) short of the 5.01-metre (16 feet-5 1/4 inch) mark she set at the world championships in Helsinki two years ago.

“I feel it is coming but I don’t know when,” Isinbayeva said. “Of course I will try here.”

In a sense, high jumper Croatia’s Blanka Vlasic has been getting closer. After an early loss to Olympic champion Yelena Slesarenko at the Oslo meet, the world champion has been perfect. She put the bar at 2.10 metres (6-10 3/4) in an attempt to break the 20-year-old mark of Stefka Kostadinova six times this year and she sometimes came close enough to give the crowd a thrill.

Golden League winners Sanya Richards and Isinbayeva will be showing up at the Gottlieb-Daimler stadium, if only to collect their half of the US$1 million bonus for winning at each of Europe’s six biggest meets.

It has not been that easy for Richards. She was accustomed to dominating the 400, but a virus cost her a place on the US squad in the event in Osaka. A disastrous 200 final, where she had hoped to pick up the gold to compensate for missing the 400, added to the misery.

It has made Richards’s comeback all the more impressive.

Ever since returning immediately from Osaka to Europe, she has excelled. In each of the final three Golden League meets, Richards set the world’s leading time to claim her US$500,000 prize and enter Stuttgart on a high.—AP