O’Keeffe hoping to complete injury comeback with good showing

FORGET Usain Bolt’s 100m and 200m nights, the first session to be sold out at this year’s world championships at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was the women’s hammer final on Saturday night when Betty Heidler, one of Germany’s two defending champions, will command centre stage.

This morning Ireland’s Eileen O’Keeffe will compete for a share of the glory that the final promises when she competes in qualifying group A, which will also feature the German.

The 25-year-old German has been impressive all year, winning nine of her 14 competitions, with a season’s best of 75.83m to take the World University Games title in Belgrade early last month. But that won’t be enough to start favourite, which might suit Heidler just fine.

She will have to pull out something really special to satisfy the fans with Poland’s Anita Wlodarczk, who finished sixth in the Olympic Games last year, topping the 2009 list with a throw of 77.20m two weeks ago. Wlodarczyk, sixth at the Olympics last year, has pieced together the most consistent season in the event, winning 11 of 13 competitions, and producing eight of the year’s 14 longest throws – all over 75 metres. She, too, is in Eileen O’Keeffe’s group.

Heidler, who was ninth in Beijing, goes in ranked fifth with 75.83m but her cause will be helped somewhat by the absence of Olympic silver medallist and former two-time world champion, Yipsi Moreno of Cuba, who is injured. However, Cuba will still be well represented by 23 year-old Arasay Thondike who has improved her pb to 73.90m.

Two years ago Eileen O’Keeffe made history when finishing sixth in the final in Osaka and she was heading for a repeat at last year’s Olympics until hit with a knee injury on the eve of departure.

She still went to the Games where she battled her way through the pain barrier and went desperately close to making it through to the final with her only serious throw of the competition. On her return to Ireland she went under surgery herself at the Santry Sports Injury Clinic to repair the damage.

“Two thirds of the cartilage area of the knee was gone completely,” she said. “I had microfracture surgery- basically just drilling at the back of the bone of the kneecap – to put in this super clot that is supposed to form a tissue that will fill the defect where the cartilage is gone.

“Obviously it will not have the strength of normal cartilage but it acts as a sort of shock absorber and prevents a build up of swelling in the knee.”

After missing all the important winter training – she spent three months on crutches – she has been working on building herself back up to where she was before.

After a succession of 68m throws she went to within nine centimetres of 70m at the national championships and if she can make that mark she will most likely go through to Saturday’s final.

“I know if I can throw 69-70 metres it will get me into the final. You just need one good throw,” she said. “And after that anything can happen because world standards have not advanced all that much since Osaka.”

Also in O’Keeffe’s group is Olympic champion, Aksana Miankova (Belarus), who has been hitting form at just the right time as indicated by her 75.28m effort in Minsk last month.

The world record holder, Tatyana Lysenko (Russia) returned to competition with a throw of 76.41m and goes in qualification group A.