Christie lined up to face France : ATHLETICS

Linford Christie will make his first appearance of the indoor season in Great Britain's match against France at Glasgow's Kelvin Hall next Saturday.

Christie, who will captain the team and run the 60 metres, has been training in Australia since mid-December. He won 100m races in Adelaide and Perth, the latter in a wind-assisted 10.02sec. Britain's team will be announced after this weekend's AAA Championships in Birmingham.

Germany's former world 400m silver medallist, Grit Breuer, has set a date for her comeback to athletics following a doping ban.

Breuer, banned with the ex-double world sprint champion, Katrin Krabbe, and their compatriot Manuela Derr in August 1993 after they admitted taking clenbuterol, plans to run at a meeting at her new club of Schwerin on 25 August. Derr, who has also switched to Schwerin from Krabbe's old club Neubrandenburg, is also scheduled to compete at the meeting.

Breuer, who won the silver medal at the 1991 world championships in Tokyo, will be unable to take part in this year's world championships in Gothenburg earlier in August because the ban will still be in force. But she is expected to launch a serious bid for a medal at next year's Olympic Games in Atlanta. Krabbe, by contrast, is unlikely to compete again and is expecting her first child.

Germany's Olympic 5,000m champion, Dieter Baumann, will attack Moses Kiptanui's world indoor 3,000m record when a new elite indoor athletics series gets under way in Stuttgart tomorrow.

The four-meeting series, with total prize money of £100,000, also features competitions in Lievin in France, Birmingham and Stockholm.

Ireland's Paul Donovan will act as the pacemaker from 800m as Baumann goes in search of Kiptanui's three-year-old mark of 7min 37.31sec.

"We'll see what happens," Baumann said. "It will be my first race indoors this year and I don't feel under any pressure. It's easy to speak about world records but not so easy to run them."

Baumann, third on the all-time indoor 3,000m list, is running his first cross-country season and hopes to take part in the world championships in Durham on 25 March.

Rosa Mota, the most successful of all women's marathon runners, is hoping to set the seal on her career with the Olympic title in Atlanta next year at the age of 38.

Mota, who has won Olympic and world titles plus three European golds, dropped out of the Tokyo marathon last November in her first race for two and a half years. But she has is now training in Porto in the north of Portugal in preparation for Atlanta under her coach and husband, Jose Pedroso.

George Vieira, the technical director for Portuguese athletics, said Mota's withdrawal in Tokyo was not due to the health problems which have troubled her over recent years.

"The problem in Tokyo was not injury or health but the pace," Vieira said. "There is no chance Rosa is retiring."