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The Star Online: Sports


Semenya coach says 800 world champion fit again

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 06:09 AM PDT

JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Fit-again 800-meter world champion Caster Semenya has set her sights on running under two minutes at this weekend's South African Championships, her coach said on Wednesday.

Michael Seme said the 20-year-old Semenya wants to better her quickest time this year of 2 minutes, 1.77 seconds at the nationals in the east coast city of Durban in a bid to kickstart her season.

They will then decide which European meets she will compete in ahead of the world championships in August in Daegu, South Korea.

"We want to run under two minutes," Seme said, "and then she can go to Europe. We will decide on the Golden League events immediately once she runs under two minutes."

Seme added that Semenya had recovered from the niggling back injury that spoiled the final part of her 2010 season and caused her to miss the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

"She is 100 percent fit now," he said. Semenya will run the 1,500 as well as the 800 in the two-day nationals this weekend.

She said earlier this year that she may run the 800 and 1,500 at next year's Olympics, but Seme said the first target was getting under two minutes in the two-lap event.

Semenya hopes to defend her 800 title at the worlds - two years after her victory in Berlin led to an 11-month gender dispute. Semenya clocked 2:04.12 at a provincial meet in South Africa in mid-February - her first 800 in four months following her back problem.

She trimmed nearly three seconds off that to win comfortably with her season-best time at Germiston, just outside Johannesburg, on March 26.

The last time the world champ went under two minutes was in Milan last September, two months after she was cleared to compete again by the IAAF following the gender controversy.

She is still some way off the 1:55.45 she produced in the German capital in 2009 as an 18-year-old that stunned the world and led to gender tests and a near yearlong enforced layoff.

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South Africa-born Wagner takes 5 wickets in 1 over

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:47 PM PDT

QUEENSTOWN, New Zealand (AP): South Africa-born Neil Wagner took an unprecedented five wickets in one over in a first-class domestic cricket competition Wednesday.

Wagner, a 25-year-old left-arm fast bowler for New Zealand's Otago, achieved his feat just before lunch in the four-day Plunket Shield match against Wellington.

Wellington began the over on 136-4 chasing Otago's first innings of 441-8 declared, but the visitors ended the over at 136-9. Wagner's performance helped Otago win the match by an innings and 138 runs in three days.

Wagner had opener Stewart Rhodes caught for 77, then bowled Justin Austin-Smellie, Jeetan Patel and Illi Tugaga for first-ball ducks. Mark Gillespie survived the next delivery before falling to the last ball of the over.

Wellington was bowled out for 148 and Wagner had a career-best 6-36, lifting his season total to 48 wickets.

The previous best performance in an over by a bowler in New Zealand was in 1929-30 when Englishman Maurice Allom took four wickets in five balls against New Zealand in a test match at Lancaster Park in Christchurch.

That feat has been achieved two other times in tests, the most recent by Wasim Akram of Pakistan against the West Indies in Lahore in the 1990-91 season.

A check of the International Cricket Council website and the Wisden online archive at the Cricinfo website indicated that statistics on the number of wickets in one over are apparently not kept.

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