Next 12 months will be crucial to GB’s athletics target

As the countdown to London 2012 today reaches one year to go, Charles van Commenee has hailed Jessica Ennis as the gold-medal favourite who can inspire Britian’s track and field athletes onto the podium.

The head coach of UK Athletics has issued an urgent rallying call to his squad, saying they are not ready for their home Olympics and will need every one of the remaining 365 days to make the necessary improvements if they are to reach the target of eight medals, including at least one gold.

Van Commenee reckons the British team need at least 15 athletes capable of making the medal podium to hit that target, and that Sheffield world champion heptathlete Ennis is the woman to inspire the home team.

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“Success breeds success,” said van Commenee. “When Jenny Meadows won bronze in Berlin (in the 800m at the world championships) two years ago all the athletes in the team got inspired. ‘Wow, Jenny Meadows can do this, I have a shot too’. You need successful athletes for other athletes to see that is achievable.

“If we only had athletes who do personal bests but don’t win anything that is not good. We need winners and Jessica is one of the very few.”

As well as Ennis, Yorkshire could send up to six athletes to compete in the Olympic Stadium next summer.

Wakefield high jumper Martyn Bernard goes into next month’s World Championships buoyed by a bronze-medal performance in last summer’s European Championships.

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Leeds’s Richard Strachan is third in the British 400m rankings with City of York runner Richard Buck not far behind. Middlesbrough long jumper Chris Tomlinson finished third in a Diamond League meeting last month, while Wakefield’s Emily Freeman was a 200m semi-finalist in Beijing and Sheffield’s Hatti Dean is on the fringes of the race to make the steeplechase squad.

But it is the form of Britons Michael Bingham and Martyn Rooney – who won silver and bronze respectively in the European Championships 400m final last year – that van Commenee cites as the current problem with a year to go.

“If they would run the times they are doing now next year that is trouble,” said van Commenee. “That should not happen, they should have run faster by now. We are not perfect yet. If everybody is fit then we might be okay, but that will never happen so we need a few more.

“We are not ready to do the Games now. We need those 12 months.

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“I started this job two-and-a-half years ago. I knew from the start that was not one day too many. Three-and-a-half years is a very short time. We still have athletes underperforming at the moment. We need those 12 months to turn things around. We still have athletes underperforming in 2011.”