havana, cuba (cmc)

Cuba's 800-metre World Champion Zulia Calatayud is eyeing a gold medal at the Pan American Games in Brazil this summer and sees Jamaican star Kenia Sinclair as one of her main dangers.

Calatayud is coming off an impressive 2006 season in which she was third fastest in the world over the two-lap event at one minute 56.91 seconds and finished the year as joint No.2 in the IAAF World Rankings — with Mozambique legend Maria Mutola - behind Kenya's Janeth Jepkosgei.

She won 11 of her 15 two-lap races this past season.

Her most important target this year is the Japan World Championship in August and she believes appearing at the Pan American Games in Brazil will be an ideal tune-up for Osaka.

"The Pan American Games will a good test one month before the Worlds," she said in an IAAF website story.

As a 19-year-old, Calatayud won silver at the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg and she missed the 2003 event in the Dominican Republic because of injury.

She expects Sinclair, a silver medallist for Jamaica at the Commonwealth Games last year March, to be one of her main rivals in Rio de Janeiro this summer.

Fast runners

"We have fast runners in the (Pan Am) area, like Jamaica's 2006 World Indoor Championships runner-up Kenia Sinclair, U.S.A.'s Hazel Clark, Canada's Diane Cummins and Colombia's Iberoamerican champion Rosibel Garcia."

Track and field at the Pan Am Games this summer will be staged from July 23-29.

Calatayud, 27, ran 1:58.82 to win gold at the Helsinki World Championship in 2005, defeating Morocco's Hasna Benhassi (1:59.42) and Russian Tatyana Andrianova (1:59.60). And she wants to improve her personal best of 1:56.04, set in 2002.

Calatayud also won the Central American and Caribbean Games in Colombia last summer.