Israel gets fifth in Moscow Challenge meet Monday...

At the Moscow Challenge meet, held as a test event for next year's IAAF World Track & Field Championships on Monday, former Husky Märt Israel (left/photo by Paul Merca) from Estonia finished fifth in the discus.

Israel's best on the day was 203-3 (61.95m), as Bogdan Pishchanikov of Russia took the win with a best of 210-7 (64.20m).

Israel was originally entered in the adidas Grand Prix meet in New York on Saturday, but apparently opted to compete closer to home.

Complete results from the Moscow Challenge are available here.

As a follow up to the post on University Place resident and Kansas junior Andrea Geubelle's apparent winning mark in the triple jump at Saturday's NCAA track & field championships in Des Moines, her coach, Wayne Pate, chimed in on kusports.com with his version of the reply that Southern Mississippi coach Kevin Stephen posted both on their site and on paulmerca.blogspot.com

Pate wrote, "Since Kevin decided to chime in on this I guess I will too. All the facts that Kevin said are True. I might add that his time line is a little skewed, though. He did inform me he had filed a protest, after the competition was over (which he has a right to do). That was the first time I had heard about a protest. It's unfortunate for the girls both, Andrea and Ganna, that this happened like it did. It was a great competition. Every coach has the right to protest a wrong. I have seen the film of Andrea's jump. It was a foul, make no mistake about that. The only problem is Andrea and I had no idea during the competition that the jump was not legal, had I known there was some decrepency, trust me we would have did things differently, having the competition secured in our minds, we decided to go after the Olympic A standard, to try and make it to the games. Which is why we threw caution to the wind. Hense the other two fouls. (Side note her last fouled jump was measured at 14.61, which is defiantly the A Standard, probably windy but still the standard.)


Andrea and I are ready to get past this, so we can concentrate on the bigger prize, it's unfortunate we let this one slip away.


I am glad there is a lot of interest on fixing this rule though, So it doesn't happen to anyone else or to us again, the way the rule is now, it could keep on happening again and again. Somebody(athlete/coach) should be informed immediately of a protest and that didn't happen."