Morgan Mitchell’s eye-catching 400m qualifies her for worlds

For the second year in a row, national 400m champion Morgan Mitchell has declared her intentions early .

Morgan Mitchell dominates the 400m at the Hunter Track Classic in Newcastle. Picture: David Tarbotton.

For the second year in a row, ­national 400m champion Morgan Mitchell has declared her intentions early with an eye-catching run at the Hunter Track Classic in Newcastle.

Last year, she went on to reach the Olympic semi-finals and stamp herself as a future star of the sport, but this year she wants to go a step further at every stage.

That began on Saturday night, when she ran even faster than last year, clocking 51.96sec to qualify for the world championships in London in August (qualifying standard 52.10sec). By the time she gets to London she wants to be fighting for a place in the final, and so far she is on ­target.

Mitchell set a personal best of 52.04sec at this stage last year and her face cracked into a huge smile when she saw 51 on the clock as she crossed the finish line this time. “My coach told me it would happen but I just didn’t trust it because we’ve been so underdone in 400m training, so I thought it could go ­either way,’’ she said.

“But I felt awesome. At 350m, I felt amazing and thought ‘this is going to be a PB’. Clearly not. I hit the last 50 and thought, yeah, nuh. I was well and truly underdone in that last bit but I’m happy I got the qualifier. (Newcastle) is my kind of spot.’’

After last year’s breakthrough season saw her reduce her 400m best to 51.25 sec, Mitchell and her coach Peter Fitzgerald agreed that the former middle-distance runner needed to find more speed to be competitive over one lap at the highest level internationally and they have focused her training around the 200m over the past few months.

She won her first ever sprint race in the Latrobe Gift 120m handicap in Tasmania just after Christmas and Fitzgerald estimates she has improved by as much of 0.4sec over 200m, which equates to more than 3m. Mitchell said she could feel the difference in her first 400m outing of the year.

“My first 200 I can run a lot more comfortably, and coming off the bend I feel lighter on my feet there and I’m happy with that. We’re going well,’’ she said.

She intends to run more 200m races than 400m races this season in the hope of making further speed gains before the national ­titles in late March. She also hopes to get more sprinting practice as part of the Australian team competing against Usain Bolt’s All Stars in the revolutionary three-meet Nitro Series starting this Saturday.

“I’m actually loving the (200m) training, finally,’’ she said “It took a while. I’m never going to be a sub-23 runner but anything under 23.8 (her current best) I will be grateful for.’’

Her Olympic relay teammate Jessica Thornton, who’s only 18, was an interested observer in Newcastle and revealed that she too had focused on speed since the Olympics, once she had recovered from the stress fracture in her lower back that she unknowingly took into Rio.

Mitchell and Thornton are likely to meet regularly over the shorter distance as the summer unfolds.

Another who is in good early form is middle-distance man Jordy Williamsz, who won the 1500m on Saturday night in 3min 41.41sec.

Williamsz finished his American college career at Villanova last year and returned to Melbourne to join Nic Bideau’s growing stable of high-class distance runners.

He hopes to make the same kind of breakthrough this year that Olympic semi-finalist Linden Hall did in her first post-college season last year.

National 800m record-holder Alex Rowe shrugged off the disappointment of missing last year’s Olympics with a winning start to the year (1:47.78), while Nick Andrews (10.55sec, 2m/s headwind) took a narrow victory over Rohan Browning (10.58sec) in the clash of the young guns in the 100m.

Meanwhile, former world indoor champion Fabrice Lapierre warmed up for a meeting with Olympic fourth placegetter Jarrion Lawson in the Nitro Series, by winning the long jump at the Boston Indoor Grand Prix. Lapierre won on a countback with a best jump of 7.80m.

Former Olympic champion Sally Pearson has arrived in Germany ahead of her first race since injury wrecked her Rio Olympic campaign.

In a tough opening test, she will meet world 100m hurdles record-holder Kendra Harrison over 60m hurdles indoors at the Karlsruhe meeting on Saturday.