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New York, USA - Double World champion Bernard Lagat will close out
his 2008 season with a debut performance at the Continental Airlines
Fifth Avenue Mile on Sunday 21 September.
Lagat headlines a deep professional field of 10 Olympians competing
in the 28th running of the world-famous mile road race down Fifth
Avenue, including America’s Nick Symmonds, Nick Willis of New Zealand,
and in the women’s division USA’s Shannon Rowbury and Britain’s Lisa
Dobriskey.
Lagat, 33, the 2007 World champion at 1500m and 5000m, is a six-time
winner of the renowned Wanamaker Mile, and will be aiming to become
only the second man in history to win both the Fifth Avenue and
Wanamaker miles in the same year. Only Isaac Viciosa of Spain in 1997
has won the Wanamaker Mile and Fifth Avenue Mile double.
Lagat
who was hampered by injury in his build-up to the Beijing Olympics not
qualifying for the 1500m final and coming ninth in the 5000m, won the
3000m at last weekend's track finale, the IAAF / VTB Bank World
Athletics Final in Stuttgart.
Symmonds, 24, of Eugene, OR, made headlines around the country with
his victory in an epic 800m at the U.S. Olympic Trials, and was a
semi-finalist at the Olympic Games. Willis, 25, the Commonwealth
champion, won the Olympic bronze in the 1500 meters in Beijing
following in the footsteps of Kiwi legends such Lovelock, Snell,
Walker, Davis, Dixon in becoming a 1500m Olympic medallist.
Rowbury, 23, of San Francisco, CA, had a breakout season, running
4:20.34 to become America’s second fastest female miler ever (behind
Mary Decker Slaney’s 4:16.71). Rowbury, who will turn 24 two days
before the race, finished seventh in the 1500m Olympic final.
Dobriskey, 24, narrowly missed the podium in the 1500 meters at the
2008 Olympic Games, finishing fourth in a personal best 4:02.10. She is
like Willis the 2006 Commonwealth Games champion at 1500m.
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