Posted: June 28, 2005

Athletics: Brown & Yelling Not Running In Helsinki

From David Monti

© 2005 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved RaceResultsWeekly.com

UK Athletics announced yesterday that neither Jon Brown nor Liz Yelling would be running at the IAAF World Championsips in Athletics. The two distance runners had planned to run the marathon.

Brown, twice fourth at the Olympic Games marathon, was not able to recover fully from his 2:09:31 effort at London last April, at least partially because he was ill. As such, he was unable to train adequately for Helsinki. Brown is known to be very methodical and careful in his training.

Yelling, the first British woman in last summer's Olympic Marathon (25th), missed training because she was recovering from a virus. "There’s no point in running and doing a bad job," Yelling said in a press release. "I don’t want to pull on a GB vest and underperform. I've not been able to cross train so I would have to start training from scratch."

Briton will not be able to field a men's team in the Marathon World Cup, a team competition held within the World Championships marathon. Team scoring is based on the combined time of three athletes and Britain had only selected three men (Huw Lobb and Dan Robinson are the other two). They may still have a full women's team, however. Paula Radcliffe, Mara Yamauchi, Hayley Haining and Debbie Mason have all been selected for the team and are eligible to compete.

The men's marathon in Helsinki is scheduled for Saturday, 13 August with the women's to follow the next day. Both start at 14:20, local time.