Malmo, Sweden - One week after successfully matching the most successful performance in six decades by Sweden at a European Championships performance, the country's top athletes gathered once again on home soil for the MAI-galan, the fourth and final leg of the 2006 Folksam Grand Prix series last night (22).

However, the championships effort had taken its toll: Carolina Kluft and Alhaji Jeng had already been forced to end their seasons due to hamstring injuries and Christian Olsson - to rest the knee that had begun to bother him in Zurich last Friday evening - restricted his activities to handing out the prices in a youth race.

Kallur flat out on the flat

But athletes like the newly crowned European hurdles champion Susanna Kallur seem to never have any real off-days. After finishing 5th in Zurich on Friday she admitted that she had not yet quite "landed" mentally after the Ullevi success. But now that was obviously something of the past.

Because despite contesting the 100m flat rather than the hurdles Susanna completely blew away the field in the second part of the race. Runners like Wyllesheia Myrick (11.24 this year) and Sally McLellan (11.36) were still ahead of Susanna at halfway but finished three metres behind her in times some three tenths off their best.

The winning time of 11.30 was run with no help whatsoever from the wind - gauge showed 0.0 - and in somewhat chilly and damp conditions. Suddenly it appears that Susanna Kallur in perfect conditions is capable of challenging not just Ludmila Engquist's NR in the Hurdles (12.47) but also Linda Haglund's NR on the flat (11.16)!

An assumption that gets support from looking at the results in other weather affected events this evening: In the men's 100m Patrick Johnson (Australia) won in 10.34 with Rodney Martin (USA) in second place with 10.40. And in the women's Long Jump and the men's Triple Jump world class performers like Bronwyn Thompson (Australia) and Jadel Gregorio (Brazil) had their winning marks held back to 6.57m and 16.92m respectively.

Both the Pole Vaulters and the High Jumpers were forced to take a number of rain induced breaks in their competitions, but still produced decent performances. In the Pole Vault Toby Stevenson, Paul Burgess and Daichi Sawano all made their opening height of 5.53 and Stevenson secured the victory by sneaking in a second attempt clearance of 5.63 between the showers.

Thornblad takes 2.30m win over Holm

And the High Jumpers were even better, especially local hero Linus Thornblad. He had a perfect record up to and including 2.27m, a height only Stefan Holm (who had a couple of earlier misses) of the other contenders managed to master. Thornblad, who finished in 4th place in Gothenburg despite a 2.34m PB, effectively sealed the victory when he went clear at 2.30m on his second attempt.

But his best jumping was still to come: Raising the bar to 2.35m Linus Thornblad seemed to forget the chilly wet evening and produced three brilliant attempts. On the first two it for a while looked as if the bar would stay on before being brushed off by a slight touch by his calves and on the third he got even better maximum height but hit the bar on his way down.

High Jumper Green wins 400m!

No women's High Jump this evening but that didn't stop Helsinki bronze medallist and Gothenburg finalist Emma Green claiming victory, because her debut as 400m runner ended in a first place in 54.95 leaving Caitlin Willis of Australia (52.75 earlier this year) three-four metres behind.

The best middle distance race of the evening was the men's 800m where Brazil's Osmar dos Santos set his usual tough pace (24.7 - 50.2). Only Kenyan Joseph Mutua tried to keep up with the Brazilian but in the end the victory went to the tall Spaniard Eugenio Barrios who produced a more even-paced effort to win by half a second in 1:45.95.

Wissman, just short of national record

However, the best event quality on the track was the men's 200m held late in the evening when the temperature probably was down to 15-16 degrees Celsius. This didn't stop five men from running between 20.35 and 20.60! All eyes of the 5500 spectators on site in the Malmo Stadion were on European silver medallist Johan Wissman and he didn't disappoint as he missed his week old NR by just nine hundredths.

But that didn't net Wissman the win, rather the third place. Just like in Karlskrona on 12 June in the very first of the Folksam Grand Prix he lost narrowly to Congolese 400m-specialist Gary Kikaya. But even Kikaya had to surrender to the extremely impressive finishing strength of 100m- winner Patrick Johnson. The 34-year-old Australian actually lowered his PB by 0.14 to 20.35!

Just like for Susanna Kallur in the 100m you get some very interesting numbers when trying to estimate what kind of time it would have been in "sprint-perfect" warm weather rather than what unfortunately was on offer this Malmo evening.