AlKass Digital
Doha, Qatar- Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge and Colombian athlete Caterine Ibarguen were named the male and female ‘World Athletes of the Year’ at the IAAF Athletics Awards 2018, held at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco on Tuesday.
Kipchoge underlined his status as the world’s most dominant distance runner. The 34-year-old Kenyan won the London Marathon in April in 2:04:17 to finish comfortably ahead of one of the deepest marathon fields in history.
Five months later, he won the Berlin Marathon in 2:01:39 to smash the world record. His time in the German capital was 78 seconds faster than the previous world record, representing the biggest single improvement on a men’s marathon world record since 1967.
Not content with being the best triple jumper in the world, Ibarguen also tested herself against the world’s best in the long jump this year – and consistently came out on top in that too.
The34-year-old Colombian won both horizontal jumps at the Central American and?Caribbean Games, the IAAF Continental Cup and at the IAAF Diamond League finals – winning the latter two titles in two different cities within the space of 24 hours.
She was unbeaten in all eight of her triple jump competitions, ending the year with a world-leading mark of 14.96m in her specialist event and a national record of 6.93m in the long jump.
Qatari hurdler Abderrahman Samba, who was one of the five finalist for the ‘IAAF Male Athlete of the Year’ award, failed to make the cut.
In June 2018, Samba stole the limelight with his 46.98 blitz in 400m hurdles at the IAAF Diamond League in Paris. The record not only surpassed legendary American track and field athlete Edwin Moses’s record of 47.02 second that was set in 1983, but made him the second person ever after world record holder Kevin Young (46.78 seconds set at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992) to break the ‘47 seconds’ barrier in one-lap hurdles.
If the Qatari hurdler wins the coveted award, it would be two-in-a-row for Qatar, as Mutaz Barshim won the IAAF Male Athlete of the Year in 2017.