Athletics: 17th IAAF World Indoor Championship Birmingham 2018 Dylan Sicobo smashes Seychelles’ 60m dash indoor record |05 March 2018

Seychelles’ men’s 100m record holder Dylan Sicobo has once again rewrote the record books, but failed to progress to the semifinals of the 60m dash at the ongoing 17th IAAF World Indoor Championship Birmingham 2018.

Running in lane five of the sixth heat on day three ‒ Saturday ‒ at the Arena Birmingham, Sicobo finished fifth in a time of 6.82 seconds which has gone down as a new Seychelles record.

The previous best of 7.02 belonged to Danny D’Souza and he got it in March 2008 in Valencia, Spain.

Sicobo -- who trains at the IAAF High Performance Centre in Réduit, Mauritius and got the 100m Seychelles record of 10.33 seconds during the semifinal of the Jeux de la Francophonie in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, last year, and matched the time in the final to win the gold medal -- finished 29th out of 49 sprinters in Birmingham ‒ United Kingdom’s second largest city.

It was Olympic 100m finalist Ben Youssef Meite of the Ivory Coast who won the sixth heat in 6.63 seconds.

Meanwhile, it is US sprinter Christian Coleman who won the 60m final on Saturday to pick up his first global gold medal.

Coleman, who smashed fellow American Maurice Greene's 20-year-old world record last month by clocking 6.34 seconds, came within 0.03 seconds of that at Arena Birmingham as he stopped the clock at 6.37 seconds. But still, the 2017 world outdoor 100m silver medallist beat the 6.42 seconds championship record set by Greene in Maebashi in 1991.

It was the second fastest indoor 60m of all time, matching the unratifiable figures Coleman clocked out of unwired blocks at Clemson University on January 19, 2018. Chinese Su Bingtian, hitherto unbeaten on the boards this season, was rewarded with an Asian record 6.42 in second place, with Coleman’s US colleague Ronnie Baker taking the bronze in 6.44 seconds. Then came Su’s inspired Chinese teammate Zhenye Xie, fourth in 6.52 seconds, followed by Iran’s Hassan Taftian, fifth in 6.53 seconds.

Coleman, who turns 22 tomorrow, said the gold medal meant more to him than the world record.

As Coleman was talking to reporters, Maurice Greene called him and he put the phone on speaker so everyone could hear Greene's congratulations.

"Just to have my name up there with those kind of guys is a huge honor," Coleman said after hanging up. "Maurice is someone I can call a friend now and that's great for me."

“I made it through the snow; I got here,” Coleman said.

“I felt pretty good. Me and my coach have been working a lot. I’m definitely proud of it. I don't think I can ever get used to this kind of feeling. You work so hard and put so much emphasis into running and you'll never get tired of the feeling of winning. It's always a great feeling and I'm pretty excited. This year I didn't come here to chase a world record but I knew I'd put in a lot of work,” Coleman tiold reporters after his win.

G. G.