Barely a week after Morne van As broke the South African indoor heptathlon record, he has done it again.
This past weekend in France, Van As won his second consecutive heptathlon. This time his grand total was 5429 points. This is 50 points more than he scored last week, also in France.
Van As readily admits that his second attempt at the record took a lot out of him. Day one, as Van As put it, played out horribly.
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“It was as if my body couldn’t get going. I guess that is to be expected when you compete in two successive weekends in the heptathlon. It was give or take, or I did not score at all in the long jump. My first two jumps were no-jumps, and you only have three jumps. With my last jump, I didn’t take any chances. Luckily, I did not overstep again. My effort in the shotput was really bad. I won the 60 metres and did OK in the high jump.”
According to Van As, he was not at all disappointed after the first day.
“Feeling sorry for myself served no purpose. It was a case of what happened, happened. Nothing can be changed. More importantly, I still believed that I could break the South African record again. That motivated me. The most important thing was that I had to make up 100 points on day two.
“Day two started well for me. I won the pole vault with a height of 4.86 metres. That is 16 centimetres better than the previous weekend, and I am confident that I can jump even higher. Maybe five metres or 5.10 metres. My winning time in the 60m hurdles was 8.37s. That is three seconds faster than last weekend. My time of 2 minutes 49 seconds was also a personal best. In the end, I won four of the seven events.”
The Tuks athlete’s big goal is still to try to qualify for the World Indoor Championships in Poland in March. He is under no illusions. It will take a lot of effort on my part because there are so many good heptathlon athletes. The make-or-break event for Van As takes place in Sweden in two weeks.
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“I will definitely give it my all. If I don’t qualify for the world event, it’s not the end of the world. This is my first time competing internationally indoors. So it’s important to learn and gain as much experience as possible. The long-term goal is to break the African record of 5911 points set by Larbi Bourrada of Algeria in 2010.”
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