The teams have threatened to field replacement players if the strike is not settled and have been holding trials for anyone with some playing experience.The players walked out last August over plans to impose a salary cap to hold down rising contracts. Clinton has said if the agreement is not reached by Monday he may ask the mediator William Usery to recommend a settlement which could then be imposed by Congress. Major League players and owners began a third successive day of talks yesterday under growing pressure from President Clinton to settle their six-month strike by Monday or face government intervention. But she has is now training in Porto in the north of Portugal in preparation for Atlanta under her coach and husband, Jose Pedroso.George Vieira, the technical director for Portuguese athletics, said Mota’s withdrawal in Tokyo was not due to the health problems which have troubled her over recent years.”The problem in Tokyo was not injury or health but the pace,” Vieira said “There is no chance Rosa is retiring.”. “It will be my first race indoors this year and I don’t feel under any pressure. It’s easy to speak about world records but not so easy to run them.”Baumann, third on the all-time indoor 3,000m list, is running his first cross-country season and hopes to take part in the world championships in Durham on 25 March.Rosa Mota, the most successful of all women’s marathon runners, is hoping to set the seal on her career with the Olympic title in Atlanta next year at the age of 38.Mota, who has won Olympic and world titles plus three European golds, dropped out of the Tokyo marathon last November in her first race for two and a half years.

Krabbe, by contrast, is unlikely to compete again and is expecting her first child.Germany’s Olympic 5,000m champion, Dieter Baumann, will attack Moses Kiptanui’s world indoor 3,000m record when a new elite indoor athletics series gets under way in Stuttgart tomorrow.The four-meeting series, with total prize money of £100,000, also features competitions in Lievin in France, Birmingham and Stockholm.Ireland’s Paul Donovan will act as the pacemaker from 800m as Baumann goes in search of Kiptanui’s three-year-old mark of 7min 37.31sec.”We’ll see what happens,” Baumann said. But she is expected to launch a serious bid for a medal at next year’s Olympic Games in Atlanta. Derr, who has also switched to Schwerin from Krabbe’s old club Neubrandenburg, is also scheduled to compete at the meeting.Breuer, who won the silver medal at the 1991 world championships in Tokyo, will be unable to take part in this year’s world championships in Gothenburg earlier in August because the ban will still be in force. Britain’s team will be announced after this weekend’s AAA Championships in Birmingham.
Germany’s former world 400m silver medallist, Grit Breuer, has set a date for her comeback to athletics following a doping ban.Breuer, banned with the ex-double world sprint champion, Katrin Krabbe, and their compatriot Manuela Derr in August 1993 after they admitted taking clenbuterol, plans to run at a meeting at her new club of Schwerin on 25 August. Linford Christie will make his first appearance of the indoor season in Great Britain’s match against France at Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall next Saturday. Christie, who will captain the team and run the 60 metres, has been training in Australia since mid-December. He won 100m races in Adelaide and Perth, the latter in a wind-assisted 10.02sec.

GB: 18 M Fitzgerald/V Kyle 33.8; 19 C Wileman/A Place 37.6; 20 LBurton/D Lenard 40.0.Women: Positions after short programme 1 O Markova (Rus) 0.5 factored placings; 2 S Bonaly (Fr) 1.0; 3 M Butyrskaya (Rus) 1.5; 4 T Szewczenko (Ger) 2.0; 5 E Liashenko (Ukr) 2.5; 6 Y Lavrenchuk (Ukr) 3.0; 7 Z Szwed (Pol) 3.5; 8 K Berankova (Cz Rep) 4.0; 9K Czako (Hung) 4.5; 10 L Hubert (Fr) 5.0 GB 28 J Arrowsmith 14.0.. Baiul is not competing this year, but she may return next year if she is reinstated from the professional ranks by 1 April.European Figure Skating Championships (Dortmund): Ice dance: Final positions: 1 S Rahkamo/P Kokko (Fin) 2.4pts; 2 S Moniotte/P Lavanchy (Fr) 3.6; 3 A Krylova/O Ovsiannikov (Rus) 6.0; 4 T Navka/S Gezoljan (Belarus) 8.2; 5 M Anissina/G Peizerat (Fr) 10.2; 6 K Mrazova/M Simecek (Cz Rep) 12.2; 7 I Romanova/I Yaroshenko (Ukr) 14.0; 8 J Goolsbee/H Schamberger (Ger) 15.4; 9 I Lobacheva/I Averbuch (Rus) 18.0; 10 B Fusar Poli/M Margaglio (It) 20.4. She will have the chance to make it five in a row in the free skating this afternoon.Markova, a 21-year-old from St Petersburg, said: “I felt well prepared and it was great.”Bonaly has twice beaten the Olympic champion, Oksana Baiul of Ukraine, to take the title. “My performance was almost perfect, but I’m not satisfied with the marks.

The placing is not my fault,” Bonaly said after leaving the ice.Bonaly last lost a section of a women’s event at the championships in 1991, when she was second in the short programme before taking the first of her four successive titles. She then took off her silver medal while the Japanese national anthem was being played for the winner, Yuka Sato.Though Markova appeared to many to have the edge yesterday, the Frenchwoman did not take kindly to defeat. It was a first defeat for Bonaly, the title holder, in any section of a European championship for four years and her reaction was reminiscent of her protest at last year’s World Championships in Japan where she refused, at first, to mount the podium for the victory ceremony. Five judges went for the Finns and four for the French couple Surya Bonaly, who has shown a disagreeable side in defeat before, was upset to finish second behind Russia’s Olga Markova in the women’s short programme. They switched to “A Hard Day’s Night” and bopped to the gold medal they have worked towards since 1985.But the margin was close.