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Namibian 18-year-old, Christene Mboma, destroyed the 25-year-old world junior 400m record with a startling dominance of the field. She clocked a jaw-dropping 48.54-second performance at the Zdzislaw Krzyszkowiak Stadium in Bydgoszcz, Poland on Wednesday.
Christine Mboma took the old record of 49.10, which was set by Falilat Ogunkoya at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
Bahraini, Salwa Eid Naser, at 23 ran 48.14 during the 2019 Doha World Athletics Championships. The two perforamances were eerily similar.
Christine Mboma interviewed by her coach Henk Botha after her stunning victory in Poland on Wednesday night. pic.twitter.com/L9Vb5yjZPt
— The Namibian (@TheNamibian) July 1, 2021
Teenagers can improve in rapid fashion and Mboma is no exception. On March 27, she ran 50.97. One week later, she ran 49.22. This latest performance is the fifth-fastest all-time.
Mboma may just be an incredible outlier, however, the only women to run faster than her are East German Marita Koch who is heavily implicated in the systematic doping regime of the 1970s and 1980s. And there is Jarmila Kratochvilova, from the Czech Republic was also under great scrutiny for drug use. A Prague newspaper claimed to have found documents implicating her as part of systematic doping. Nothing has been proven in the court of law. Two days ago, Eid Naser was suspended for two years by the Athletics Integrity Unit.
She was first provisionally suspended for missing at least three drug tests over a 12-month period of time. The appealable suspension was handed down in June 2020. The decision was overturned in October. The AIU has appealled the decision and won.
1 47.60 Marita Koch GDR 18.02.57 1 Canberra 06.10.1985
2 47.99 Jarmila Kratochvílová CZE 26.01.51 1 Helsinki 10.08.1983
3 48.14 Salwa Eid Naser BRN 23.05.98 1 Ad-Dawhah 03.10.2019
4 48.16 Marita Koch GDR 18.02.57 1 Athínai 08.09.1982
4 48.16 Marita Koch GDR 18.02.57 1rA Praha 17.08.1984
