Former West LA Runner Sets Ghana National Record and World Leading 800m Mark
Amankwah Earns SEC Men's Runner of the Week
Ghanaian 800m runner Alex Amankwah smashed Kennedy Osei's 20 year old national 800m indoor record after running a World Leading 1:46.86 on Saturday 24th January at the Vanderbilt Indoor Invitational in Nashville, Tennessee.
The previous national indoor best had been 1:47.24, set by Kennedy Osei at a meet in Birmingham, United Kingdom on 25th February, 1995.
The University of Alabama junior, who won with a comfortable personal best followed by Leslie, Cory in 1:47.63 and Jacopo Lahbi in 1:48.28, also broke his school's 11-year old 800m record in the process.
He was born in Ghana on 2nd March, 1992, before emigrating to the USA with his parents Erick Amankwah and Dorothy Nyarko in later years.
The 22 year old has been on the Ghana Athletics Association's radar for a while now and, received consideration for the 2014 Commonwealth Games/African Championship selection for the 4x400m relay team, after just missing the GAA's 800m qualifying standard.
Like many other national athletes, he will be looking forward to meeting the Ghana Athletics Association's selection criteria for the 2015 All Africa Games and the World Championships in Beijing when the outdoor season begins.
His performance comes only a week after another national athlete Flings Owusu-Agyapong posted a world leading 7.18 in the 60m at the Gotham Cup in New York.
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