Tarbei cruises to 800m final

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Photo | AFP Kenya’s Abraham Tarbei celebrates after winning the men’s 1,500m T46 gold medal during the Paralympic Games at the Olympic Park in east London on Tuesday.  

By KIRATIANA FREELON Special Correspondent in London kiratiana@gmail.com
Posted  Thursday, September 6  2012 at  23:48

IN SUMMARY

• Kenyan targets second gold after claiming slot in the T46 final with third fastest time

Just two days after winning gold in the 1500m T46, Tarbei looked in fine form on his way to a another gold medal in the 800m T46 on Thursday.

He qualified with the third fastest time for the final-- just six one-hundredths of a second behind Austria’s Gunther Matzinger, who ran a 1:55.33.

“My target was to qualify for the final and in the final my aim is to win,” said the always confident Tarbei.

Jonah Chesum and Stanley Cheruiyot will join Tarbei in the final. They qualified with the third and fourth fastest times in their heats respectively. Matzinger won the gold medal in the 400m T46 on Tuesday.

“We’ll see what can happen,” Matzinger said. “I hope I can get a medal, but there are some touch Kenyans out there.”

In other qualification news, Hanah Mwangi was disqualified from her 200m T12 heat for a false start. That was her last event of the Games.

Kenya has so far won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze and are looking to capture three more medals in the 5000m T11, 800m T46 and marathon T11 before the Games end.

But even before the Kenya team set foot on the track and field last week, they were up against a difficult task of repeating their 2008 effort.

And it wasn’t entirely their fault either. Two of the events that Kenyans won gold medals in were not offered at these games - the 10,000m T13, won by Henry Kirwa and the 5,000 T46, won by Abraham Tarbei.

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Scrapped from programme

In order to run in two events, Tarbei even added the 800m T46 event to his 1500 T46 program.

Unlike the athletics program at the Olympic Games, which has a set of events that no could imagine being deleted, the athletics program at the Paralympic Games is always changing.

After Henry Wanyoike won the 10,000m T11 for blind athletes at the Athens Paralympic Games in 2004, he was unable defend his title in 2008 because it had been scrapped from the program.

As each Games has passed, more and more middle and long distance events have disappeared. Thus, Kenyan athletes have not been able to defend three Paralympic Gold medals in the last two Paralympic Games.