U.S. Dominates on Home Soil at IAAF Indoor Champs

(ATR) The United States track and field team won 23 medals at the IAAF Indoor World Championships in Portland, Oregon, besting the next country by 18 medals.

The 23 medals and five golds represented the best performance by Team USA ever in the event. Ethiopia placed second with five medals while France finished third with four.

The four-day event came to a close on Sunday, March 20 and marked the first world championships under new IAAF president Sebastian Coe and the first that Russian athletes were not allowed to compete at due to the country’s competition ban for doping violations.

The Russian absence was felt in the final medal table where no country outside of the top three earned more than three medals. Russia came home with nine medals at the 2012 indoor championships in Turkey.

"It's a sad moment for our sport," Coe said regarding the Russian ban, "but it hasn't stopped this from being a fantastic athletic experience for spectators and athletes alike. It shows you that the sport is still very strong."

Despite no Russian athletes in attendance and a Jamaican team that only won three medals and didn’t feature star sprinter Usain Bolt, 39,283 fans came to the Oregon Convention Center over four days of competition, with several sessions selling out according to the IAAF.

Coe says the lively attendance at the event shows that his sport can recover from recent doping scandals.

"We must always, always remember that, yes, our product is athletics, but our business is entertaining people," Coe said. "You would not have been sitting here [the other night], concluding we're a sport in terminal decline because we're not."

However, Coe realizes that much work needs to be done in order to prove to fans the sport is clean again.

"It's fundamentally about creating a platform for clean athletes to be able to show the world they're extraordinary talents, without people necessarily sitting in the stands questioning whether what they're watching has got any more merit than professional wrestling," Coe said.

"But practically, I'm afraid there probably are always going to be a few people in a few systems that will want to try and buck the system. We have to be proactive, have to really throw every effort behind creating opportunities for clean athletes. This is all about protecting clean athletes."

"Nobody is denying the challenges that lie ahead to regain trust but this has been a pretty good start," Coe told AFP.

Written by Kevin Nutley

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