Ath: Golden status yet to sink in for Nesterenko

AAP General News (Australia)
08-23-2004
Ath: Golden status yet to sink in for Nesterenko

By Alastair Macdonald

ATHENS, Aug 22 Reuters - Yuliya Nesterenko is still a bit stunned by her overnight
success and finds it hard to imagine that becoming the Olympic 100 metres champion will
change her life.

"I really don't know. Maybe some things will change. But I really don't know," she
said in Athens today, 12 hours after she ran the race of her life to take the gold medal.

"I really don't know how I feel," said the 25-year-old, who is barely known even back
home in Belarus and had never before run a competitive 100 metres in under 11 seconds.

Short-term at least, the win in 10.93 seconds may reduce her workload at the Games.

"It was the plan to run in the 200 metres but after the victory that may change," she
said, even though an open field and fast track might give her prospects of another medal.

She will run in the 4x100 relay, though the team from the former Soviet republic is
given little chance of a placing.

Pressed to explain her sudden spurt of speed over the past months that has put her
at the front of a field weakened by doping scandals, Nesterenko has put it down to a new
training regime with more weightlifting -- and getting her own flat.

She had been living with her parents in the Polish border town of Brest -- perhaps
best known for the peace treaty that took revolutionary Russia out of World War One --
but she has recently been able to afford to branch out on her own.

"My living conditions have changed and now I am by myself and that has improved the
way I feel," she said today.

The $US60,000 ($A83,000) the Belarussian government has promised to gold medal winners
should help more.

President Alexander Lukashenko conferred on her the Order of the Fatherland, third class, today.

"We finally got our own apartment, me and my husband. Before we used to live with my
parents and it wasn't comfortable," she said after the race yesterday.

The competition had been thrown wide open before the Games when American champion Marion
Jones failed to qualify and the first two finishers from last year's world championships,
Americans Kelli White and Torri Edwards, were banned for doping.

Greece's Katerina Thanou, the Sydney silver medallist, was also absent having withdrawn
over a missed dope test.

Nesterenko came to the Games with a personal best of 11.02.

But she bettered it in all three qualifying rounds and the final, dipping under 11
seconds each time and clocking a national record of 10.92 in the semi-finals.

"I am very sorry that some of the big names were missing and I could not compete against
them," she said on Saturday.

"I believe in God and I believe God saw all my efforts and helped me. Now I just want
to go home to see my family and share this joy with them."

Reuters nh

KEYWORD: OLY ATH NESTERENKO

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