Tasmania’s Deon Kenzie has run faster than any Para-athlete before him, clocking a new 1500m world record in the T38 classification of 4.08.51 in Hobart on Saturday afternoon. Kenzie had previously won a bronze medal in his classification for the 1500m at the IPC World Championships in Lyon. The previous 1500m T38 world record mark was held by Abbes Saidi of Tunisia since July 2005 with a time of 4:09.50.
Kenzie’s coach Mike Gunson said the conditions were excellent for his charge’s record run at The Domain track in Hobart.
“As it turned out the conditions were, not perfect but pretty good. I think sometimes just moving away from your home track … we don’t have a lot of athletes. We set ourselves up to do it, we made it public, and from an IPC point of view we had three television cameras here filming the event so it’s good for athletics in Tasmania. It’s just good for para-athletics.”
Gunson said Kenzie followed the pre-race plan perfectly. “I set him to run a very evenly paced race, with the first (three) 400 metres in a 66, 66, 66 (seconds) and then come home as fast as he could,” said Gunson “He must have come home in about 50. So that was the race plan and he followed it very well. The first one was 65, 67, 66 and then he’s come home in 50, He’s a very good judge of pace and basically he was smack on the pace the whole way. The wind was quite strong at The Domain, so it wasn’t an easy race. He paced himself well and just had enough in reserve to come home hard.”
Gunson said Kenzie’s next major race would hopefully be at the 2015 IPC World Championships in Doha, Qatar.

Kenzie’s new world record will need to be ratified as official by the IPC.