Vili on brink of history

Valerie Vili stands ready to make history – the only New Zealander to win back-to-back world track and field championships. She's got a cracking chance when the Berlin world championships get under way this weekend, with Vili throwing in the shot put's qualifying rounds tonight.

Vili, the reigning Olympic, world and Commonwealth champion, is the owner of the seven longest puts in the world this year. That's a considerable advantage in an event where psychology plays a vital role. Vili's dominant physical attributes and her menacing, glowering style worked a treat at last year's Olympics. Most of the opposition were psyched out from the start and no one got near her opening effort.

If she makes history, she will join only two other women who have won back-to-back world titles in the shot. China's Zhihong Huang did it in 1991 and 1993 (at Tokyo and Stuttgart respectively) and the great Astrid Kumbernuss, of Germany, won three in a row – at Gothenborg in 1995, Athens in 1997 and Seville in 1999. She also won Olympic gold at Atlanta in 1996 and amassed 53 wins before being beaten in 1997.

Kumbernuss skipped the '98 season to have her son and returned to win her third world title in 1999. She also won a bronze medal in the shot at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. It's not pushing fantasy too far to suggest that Vili could put together a record to rival that of Kumbernuss.

Still only 24 and, with world championships held every two years, she could compete well into her 30s if the hunger is still there. Berlin will already be her fourth world championships – she finished fifth in Paris in 2003, third behind rival and friend Nadzeya Ostapchuk of Belarus in Helsinki in 2005 and won at Osaka in 2007. Kumbernuss competed in five world championships.

Vili will be the hottest of favourites at Berlin. Ostapchuk is not in the field and the only other women to have bettered the magic 20m mark are Nataliia Mikhnevich (Belarus), Nadine Kleinert (Germany) and Anna Avdeeva (Russia). Best of those is Mikhnevich with a put of 20.03m in May and Avdeeva, who recorded 20.07m last month.

Kleinert, 33, and a former Olympic silver medallist, has thrown 19.80m this year and will have home advantage. They will be Vili's main rivals but the biggest threat may come from China's Lijao Gong, fifth at Beijing but only 20 and on the rise. She has a best of 19.82m this year but it is not unknown for Chinese athletes to peak suddenly.

However, providing all goes well, Vili may put what could amount to long-lasting mark on the world shot put title in Berlin. Her best this year is 20.69m in May, more than 60cm ahead of what anyone else has produced so far. Like all field events, meltdowns and technical problems can trip up even the best shot put exponent – though Vili has always impressed as an intensely focused athlete.

One of the few question marks over her future was one she raised herself – money. After she won the Halberg Award for the second time this year and in a media interview in the UK – in which she said was misquoted – Vili played down hints that she might look overseas for her future. She could be eligible to represent Britain or France by lineage and marriage respectively but she quashed talk she was considering that. However, she also played it cool when Sir Murray Halberg said she would be the most successful track and field athlete New Zealand had ever produced.

Vili has since been at pains to underline that she is a proud New Zealander but the fact remains that the shot put is not a glamorous event and she does not earn large endorsement deals. Her income is more than $200,000, considerable on a gross basis but it includes sports medicine and sports science help, plus full costs for training and competing in the Olympics, Commonwealth Games and world championship events. Only about $60,000 goes directly into her bank account – and that has been beefed up by Sparc from $40,000 last year.

In world athletics terms, that is pretty small potatoes. Vili will be standing next to, and watching on the victory dais, athletes who earn a great deal more than that in more populous countries – sometimes up to and into seven figures. If she wins in Berlin, she will be an even more valuable property.