BATON ROUGE — Lady Tiger great Lolo Jones is well on her way to defending her IAAF World Indoor Championships gold medal in the 60-meter hurdles following an outstanding performance last weekend in a pair of meets in Glasgow, Scotland, and Karlsruhe, Germany.
Jones, who continues to train in Baton Rouge with LSU head coach Dennis Shaver, emerged as the world leader in the event as she followed a 7.97-second clocking at the Aviva Grand Prix in Glasgow on Saturday with a blistering time of 7.90 to win the BW Bank Indoor Meeting in Karlsruhe on Sunday.
Jones is off to a fast start in her World Indoor title defense as this marks the earliest point in a season that she has recorded a time of 7.90 or faster in the 60-meter hurdles.
During the 2008 season in which she won her first career World Indoor gold medal in the event, Jones did not break 7.90 until her fourth competition of the year. In fact, she established her own personal record of 7.77 in winning the event title at the BW Bank Indoor Meeting in Karlsruhe on Feb. 10 of that season.
The Lady Tiger legend then put an exclamation point onto the end of a memorable 2008 indoor campaign by winning a gold medal at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Valencia, Spain.
She is scheduled to race in three more European meets over the next week as she lines up at the PSDBank Meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany, on Wednesday, the Sparkassen Cup in Stuttgart, Germany, on Saturday and the Russian Winter IAAF Permit in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday. Jones will then defend her U.S. title at the USA Indoor Championships in Albuquerque, N.M., on Feb. 27-28 before defending her gold medal at the 2010 IAAF World Indoor Championships in Doha, Qatar, on March 12-14.