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ATHLETICS

BY MIKE ROWBOTTOM

It seemed reasonable enough to ask Tony Jarrett which gave him most satisfaction from Sunday's performance in Stuttgart - lowering his English 60 metres hurdles record to 7.44sec, or the fact that he had come within thousandths of a second of bea ting the world's acknowledged No 1 high hurdler, Colin Jackson?

FROM the start, Ma Junren's recipe for turning Chinese peasant girls into world record-breaking runners was distinctive. He took teenagers from his home province of Liaoning, trained them to run marathons every day at high altitude, fed them exoti c tonics of turtle's blood and caterpillar fungus, imposed a military-style regime that outlawed long hair and boyfriends, and had 11 athletes' appendices removed for "toxicological problems".

ATHLETICS China's "Ma Family Army" of record-breaking women's distance runners have been disbanded and will never reunite, the team-leader and double world champion, Wang Junxia, said yesterday.

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THE Chinese coach Ma Junren revealed yesterday that 11 of his long- distance runners had their appendixes removed last year.

Gottlob Frick, opera singer: born Oelbronn, Wurtemberg 28 July 1906; died Pforzheim, Baden-Wurtemberg 18 August 1994.

'FAR from perfect,' was Colin Jackson's assessment of his most famous run. It broke the world record by 0.01sec and won a world championship gold in Stuttgart last year, but hurdles six to ten, he says, were not quite right. He has been working on hurdles seven and eight this year and in the winter he will start on nine and 10. When he finally puts them all together, he expects the world record time to tumble considerably further.

HAILE GEBRESILASIE'S performance in reducing Said Aouita's seven-year-old 5,000 metres world record by almost a second and a half has thrown down the gauntlet to his Kenyan middle-distance rivals.

HOPEFUL sounds a reasonable enough word to use in connection with the forthcoming season. But Steve Backley is not comfortable with it. 'That is the way I would have described myself last year,' he said. 'This year I am fit. This year I am confident.'