Ethiopia’s Girma Breaks 25-Year 3000m Indoor World Record

Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma shattered the 25-year-old world 3,000m indoor record on Wednesday by more than one second at the Lieven meeting as Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis won his third successive pole vault event.

Girma clocked 7min 23.81sec to better the old mark of 7min 24.90sec set by Kenya’s Daniel Komen at Budapest in February 1998.

The Ethiopian raced alone over the closing four laps and was followed home by Spaniard Mohamed Katir, who broke the European record in 7min 24.68sec, a time also lower than the old world record.

Girma is a specialist outdoors in the 3000m outdoor steeplechase, an event in which he was the 2021 Olympic silver medallist.

He was also runner-up in the world championships in Doha in 2019 and last year at Eugene.

Indoors, he previously won silver medal in the 3000m at the 2022 worlds.

Meanwhile, Olympic and world champion Duplantis easily won the pole vault with a clearance of 6.01m but the charismatic Swede gave up on trying to beat his own world record of 6.21m.

It was a third successive win for 23-year-old Duplantis in the indoor season after 6.10m in Uppsala on February 2 and 6.06m in Berlin on last Friday.

Unlike those two meetings, Duplantis on Wednesday opted against attempting to beat his world mark.

He still did enough to defeat Italy’s Claudio Stecchi (5.82m) and Kurtis Marschall of Australia (also 5.82m).

Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala, 27, claimed victory in the 60m in 6.54sec, edging Italy’s Olympic 100m champion Marcell Jacobs.

Jacobs, a two-time winner in Lievin, clocked 6.57sec with Arthur Cisse of Ivory Coast third with a time of 6.59sec.

Punch/Samuel Isaiah