Athletics: Holmes alone as Jones sets his goal

On Friday Max Jones, the performance director of UK Athletics, announced the British team selection criteria for the Olympic Games and set a target of seven medals in the track and field arena in Athens. Having scraped just four gongs at the World Championships in Paris last summer, none of them gold, it could be described as a mission improbable. As the British team tackled their first fixture since the French flop, the Norwich Union International at the Kelvin Hall, it was difficult to see from where the increase in medal productivity might come.

In Paris Britain's best were outshone by the emerging stars from Sweden, one of the five nations competing on the boards in Glasgow yesterday. Their three leading lights, Carolina Kluft, Christian Olsson and Kajsa Bergkvist, were all absent yesterday but were training elsewhere in preparation for more meaningful tests ahead in 2004. The gaps in the British team line-up were even more significant. Jonathan Edwards and Colin Jackson both competed in the fixture a year ago but have since retired to the commentary box, and in Jackson's case also to trackside (the former sprint hurdler has become coach to Ian Mackie, the Scottish 400 metres runner). And then there is Dwain Chambers, who is facing a two-year suspension after testing positive for the "designer" steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG).

Paula Radcliffe is back on the road, of course, but on the track and in the field likely British medal winners are not as thick on the ground as they once were. It is just as well, then, that Kelly Holmes is still going strong. At 33, the one-time Army judo champion has amassed a collection of 10 major championship medals and the odds are that she will be adding number 11 in Athens in August.

It might even be gold. In Paris Holmes was content to take 800m silver in the slipstream of Maria Mutola but this year she is looking beyond the event in which her Mozambican training partner has taken such a stranglehold. The 1500m is her focus for Athens, and for the World Indoor Championships in Budapest in March, and yesterday the Kentish woman was in fine form over the longer distance. Content to track the Slovenian Sonja Roman until just before the bell, she sprinted clear on the final 200m circuit, crossing the line in 4min 9.15sec, the fastest time in the world this year.

"It was easier than I expected," Holmes confessed. "I felt comfortable out there." As indeed she ought to, considering she attempts to keep up with Mutola on the training track each day. The pair have been working together on the outskirts of Johannesburg for 16 months now and the benefits have clearly been mutual. Mutola has not lost a race since. Yesterday she led from gun to tape, recording her 25th successive victory at 800m.

Mutola holds the World, Olympic and Commonwealth titles at 800m and in Budapest she will be chasing a sixth successive world indoor crown. Holmes has yet to strike gold in a global championship, though morally she has a claim on the world indoor 1500m title that was snatched ahead of her by Regina Jacobs in Birmingham last March, the American having since tested positive for THG. "I think all her achievements in 2003 should be void," the Briton said, in frustration rather than hope.

Jason Gardener took a similar sense of injustice into his first race of 2004. Chambers filled a 100m team place ahead of him for the World Championships in Paris and the "Bath bullet" was taking aim at his rival when he said before getting to his marks in Glasgow: "I can accept that people are better than me but not that people have cheated to be better than me." Indoors, over 60m, no British speed merchant has been better than Gardener and the reigning European champion got his season off to a flying start, beating former world champion Tim Harden in 6.54sec, the fastest time in the world this year.

Elsewhere, though, British success was depressingly thin on the ground. Indeed, the only other winner in the British team (who finished third behind Russia and a "World Select" team in the overall competition) Helen Karagounis, who improved her 400m indoor personal best by half-a-second with a 53.31 sec clocking. Abi Oyepitan won the 60m in 7.27sec, also a personal best, although the Shaftesbury Barnet Harrier was wearing the colours of the World Select.

Literally and metaphorically, the high point of the meeting came in the women's pole vault, Yelena Isinbayeva prevailing ahead of Russian rival Svetlana Feofanova with a clearance of 4.76m. Isinbayeva, who broke the world outdoor record at Gateshead last summer, brushed the bar with her final attempt at 4.81m, a world indoor record. With a $30,00 (£16,400) bonus at stake, the meeting organisers had reason to breathe a sigh of relief.