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WORLD STARS TRAIN NEARBY
Daily News 2003
Peninsula track club boasts the likes
of White, Jacobs, Gaines
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BY FRED BAER
PARIS, France - Burlingame may be the
fastest place on earth. Its ZMA track club has produced
the fastest women - and some quick men.
They include Kelli White of Union City,
the new women's 100 meter world champion, No. 2 rated Chyrste
Gaines out of Stanford, and European men's 100 meter champion
Dwain Chambers, representing Great Britain. He has lived
in Millbrae during the winter and early spring the past
two years. Chambers missed winning the world title this
week by a hundredth of a second.
The Peninsula also has some of the USA's
top middle distance runners, jumpers, and throwers, who
are competing at the world championships in Paris. In the
latter group, Stanford graduate Regina Jacobs easily advanced
from yesterday's first round in the women's 1,500 meters
with the third best time, 4 minutes, 8.12 seconds.
White won the world 100 title Sunday
in a 2003 season-leading 10.85 and made history yesterday
by winning the 200. Her ZMA teammate Gaines, a 1992 Stanford
grad, was the previous world co-leader at 10.89, which she
ran at Zurich on August 15. Gaines peaked too late to make
the U.S. individual line-up here. Those spots were determined
at the USA championships at Stanford in June. White won
both sprints at Stanford. Gaines had muscle cramps in the
100 semis at the nationals. She finished fifth in the finals
to stay in the relay pool for Paris.
An Olympic relay gold medalist, Gaines
is expected to be part of the American 4x100 meter relay
team this weekend. She is the USA's most experienced relay
runner and has three previous world championship gold medals,
plus gold and bronze on Olympic teams.
Chambers was a slight favorite in the
men's 100 here and was the fastest semifinal winner, in
10.06. But he lost in a blanket final that had a surprise
victor, Kim Collins of St. Kits, who ran 10.07. The next
three men all clocked 10.08. Chambers was placed fourth
after computer timing analysis. World record holder Tim
Montgomery (who has also utilized Balco's labs in the past)
was the top USA finisher, fifth in 10.11.
The ZMA athletes work with nutritionist
Victor Conte of Burlingame's Balco Laboratories. The sprinters
train on the Chabot College track in Hayward, where they
are coached by Remy Korchemy, a former national coach in
the USSR (from the Ukraine). He started working with local
athletes at Stanford in 1983 after being invited there by
former Cardinal coach Brooks Johnson.
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