Sydney  - Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie ran away with the inaugural HBA Great Australian Run in Melbourne on Sunday.

The 35-year-old middle-distance maestro left Kenyan Patrick Makau at the 11-kilometre mark to finish the 15-kilometre race in 42 minutes and 40 seconds. Australian amateur Collis Birmingham came in third behind Makau.

Olympic marathon champion Constantine Dita of Romania started favourite in the women's section, but could only manage sixth.

Monte Carlo  - The Golden League athletics series is to be doubled from six to 12 meets from 2010 onwards, a top official of the ruling body IAAF said on Sunday.

IAAF vice-president Helmut Digel of Germany said that sponsors have signalled interest despite the worldwide recession which would allow the series to move outside Europe into new markets.

Digel said that the expansion was necessary due to lower television interest in Europe in the past years.

The current Golden League hosts are Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Paris, Rome and Zurich with athletes winning their event at all six stops eligible for a jackpot of 1 million dollars.

Frankfurt - Only the sky was the limit when Yvonne Buschbaum soared to big heights as one of the leading women's pole vaulters in Germany.

Now the sky is wide open for Buschbaum, who feels the lightness of being after revealing her transsexuality last year and undergoing a gender change to Balian Buschbaum since then.

"Courage is the road to freedom. I woke up in complete freedom today. The sky is wide open," said a recent diary entry on his website.

Monte Carlo - The head of the international athletics federation Friday accused International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge of showing "a lack of respect" for athletics.

Lamine Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), said he was surprised at Rogge's criticism of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's celebrations after winning the 100 metres in world-record time at Beijing Olympics.

Beijing - The foot injury that forced China's star hurdler Liu Xiang to withdraw from this year's Olympic Games is looking more likely to need surgery that could keep him out of competition for six months, Chinese media said on Friday.

Liu, 24, returned to China on Wednesday after consulting US medical experts but had still not made a final decision on whether to opt for surgery, the official China Daily and other media said.

Monte Carlo - The IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, has imposed two-year doping bans on eight Russian athletes for testing positive a varied of substances, including the banned blood-booster EPO.

It emerged Thursday that the athletes are mostly from the sport of walking and include Vladimir Kanaykin, the 20-kilometre walk world record holder, and Alexsey Voyevodin, 50km bronze medalist at the Athens Olympics in 2004, who both tested positive for EPO in an out- of-competition test in Saransk in April.