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Long Jump Sensation Sebastian Bayer: In the Footsteps of Bob Beamon

Five months before the 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics berlin 2009™, Germany (15 – 23 August 2009) the host nation has suddenly found a new athletics star.

Sebastian Bayer’s breathtaking performance at the European Indoor Championships on Sunday (8) came totally out of the blue and was not something anyone expected least the athlete himself.

Bayer’s jump in Turin was amongst the final action of the whole championships, and with his performance he managed to conclude the European Indoors with the biggest sensation of its three days. The 22-year-old from Bremen in northern Germany jumped to European indoor record of 8.71m, just missing the World indoor record of athletics legend Carl Lewis by eight centimetres.

When asked by journalists in the Mixed Zone if he knew where the World indoor record stood he said ‘no’. When told about the mark of 8.79m, which Carl Lewis jumped three years before Sebastian Bayer was born the German said with a sense of humour – “That is a pity that I missed it!”

Click on the following link to go to the IAAF website to read the full version of this remarkable story of athletics’
latest global star – http://www.iaaf.org/WCH09/news/kind=100/newsid=49694.html

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