Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – In-form US sprinter Melissa Jefferson-Wooden will return home to fine-tune final touches before heading to the world championships in Tokyo as the big favourite for a sprint double. The 24-year-old wrapped up her European swing of the Diamond League circuit with a 100m victory in Brussels in 10.76 seconds over a loaded field including reigning world champion Sha’Carri Richardson and Jamaican legend Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. That win came hot on the heels of an impressive victory at last week’s Silesia meet in 10.66 seconds. It was just one-hundredth of a second off her personal best that makes her the joint fifth-fastest woman in history.
“I feel great,” she said after her Brussels triumph, taking her to eight straight wins this season in the blue riband event. “It was a little cool out there, but I was able to still come out here and compete and run a fast time. It’s always a blessing to come out to new places and be able to gain the crowd’s respect — and I was just happy to come out here and perform the way that I did.”
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Jefferson-Wooden’s run of form comes at a perfect time given the world championships kick off in the Japanese capital in just three weeks. Next up is a training camp for the South Carolina native who sealed prestigious NCAA titles in the 100m outdoors and 60m indoors while attending the little-known Coastal Carolina University.
“At this point, it’s just about consistency and practice making perfect,” she said. “I feel like I’ve done a very good job of being disciplined in who I am this year and who I want to be as an athlete. And I feel like that discipline is getting me the times that I want to see, the results that I want to get. So now it’s just about closing out the regular season for me, and then going back home and getting a little bit more training in before it’s time to go to Tokyo.”
Jefferson-Wooden maintained, however, that there would not be wholesale changes to her approach to racing. “It’s just about keeping the main thing be the main thing, looking at the smaller parts of the race, and fine-tuning those things and critiquing those,” she said. “The race in Tokyo is going to be about the person who makes the least amount of mistakes. Obviously, I want to be that person because I want the gold. That’s what the mission is, going back home and getting these last training sessions in.”
Jefferson-Wooden, who became the first woman since 2003 to win the 100-200m double at the US trials earlier this month, added that jetting over to Europe to race had allowed her an invaluable insight into how to cope with jetlag as a professional athlete. “I could get used to what I need to do, as far as getting acclimatised and adjusted to the time difference,” she said. “I feel like it was a really good starter for where I need to be when it comes time to travel over to Asia.”
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