Lapierre leaps 8.78m in long jump trials

Australian Fabrice Lapierre floated and flew to the sixth-greatest performance by a
long jumper under any conditions on Sunday - and then predicted even bigger things
to come.
Lapierre's massive jump of 8.78m - with the aid of a 3.1m per second tailwind - was
the standout performance of the three-day Commonwealth Games selection trials.
Only Americans Mike Powell, Bob Beamon and Carl Lewis, Soviet athlete Robert Emmiyan
and Cuban Ivan Pedroso have ever jumped further, and Pedroso's jump was also
wind-assisted.
"It's always there," said Lapierre, 26, who won the world indoor title last month.
"People don't understand that one day I'm going to jump something even more
exceptional than that.
"It's only a matter of time until I do something crazy and everyone is going to take
notice."
In a high-standard competition, Chris Noffke finished second, moving to fourth on
the Australian all-time list with a jump of 8.33m with a legal tailwind.
Noffke's big leap in the penultimate round provided Lapierre with the motivation to
go for broke.
"I couldn't have cared if the wind was 10 metres per second wind - that jump was
incredible," he said.
" ... it just felt natural, nothing special.
"But it felt like I was flying I guess, it felt so easy - like I was floating
through the air."
Lapierre's legal PB remains at 8.35m and he has pledged to break the national record
of 8.49m by the end of 2010.
Ryan Gregson won the blue-riband 1500m title on Sunday, mowing down Jeff Riseley in
the final 20 metres in the first-ever competitive clash between the two rising stars
of Australian middle distance running.
Gregson won a tactical race in three minutes 44.99 seconds ahead of Riseley
(3:45.15) and Jeremy Roff (3:45.37) with the first two certain to be among the
estimated 70 athletes named in the initial Delhi Games team on Monday.
"We had 12 guys trying to think on their feet today and it pretty much went down to
what I thought it would be like," said the 19-year-old Gregson.
"Riseley's strength was going a lap out and just trying to hold me out.
"And as I have shown every race this season, my strength has just been simply the
home straight - that has been the only time I have been taking the lead.
" ... we are all going to continue getting better together, then one of us is going
to make a breakthrough and win an Olympic medal or something like that."
Australia's two reigning world champions, pole vaulter Steve Hooker (5.80m) and
discus thrower Dani Samuels (63.61m), were untroubled in winning their respective
events.
But despite the $100,000 on offer if he could break Sergey Bubka's 17-year-old world
record, Hooker did not even get a crack at 6.15m after missing twice at 5.95m and
once at 6.01m.
WA sprinter Jody Henry made a massive double breakthrough on the weekend, adding the
200m title in 23.29 on Sunday to the one-lap national crown she had won the previous
night.
The 25-year-old Henry is set to run both events in Delhi, the first time she will
have contested individual races at a major international championship.
Veteran Patrick Johnson (20.78) bounced back from the disappointment of finishing
out of the medals in the 100m by edging out Aaron Rouge-Serret by four hundredths of
a second in the 200m final.
Other winners on Sunday who did enough to book their places on the Delhi Games team
included Scott Martin (shot put), Jarrod Bannister (javelin), Petrina Price (high
jump), Lauren Boden (400m hurdles) and Hayley Butler (100m hurdles).
Martin has also qualified in the discus, the event he won four years ago in Melbourne.