European indoor gold gives Kluft clean sweep

Sweden's Carolina Kluft captured the one major title to elude her so far in a short but stunningly successful career by winning the European indoor pentathlon title on Friday night.

The 22-year-old Olympic and world heptathlon gold medallist won the world indoor pentathlon title in Birmingham in 2003 after finishing third in the last European indoors in Vienna three years ago.

Her hopes of setting a world record disappeared when she managed only 13.29m in the shot put, well short of her personal best of 14.48.

Despite steadily improving her long jump mark to 6.65m over the three rounds she still needed to run four seconds faster than her previous 800 metres best of two minutes 14.95 to break the world mark.

Kluft eventually clocked 2:13.47 to set a personal best of 4,948, bettering the 4,933 she compiled in Birmingham, but 43 points short of the world record set by Russian Irina Belov in 1992.

In the morning session Kluft equalled her personal best of 8.91 seconds in the 60 metres hurdles then bettered her previous indoor high jump best of 1.89 metres by four centimetres before failing with three attempts at 1.96.

Malta's Rachid Chouhal was yesterday in action in the men's long jump where he competed in the first qualifying group. After two no-jumps, Chouhal, who holds the national record of 7.65m (outdoor), leaped to a modest 6.80m to finish 15th in his group.