In doing so, the 28-year-old Birchfield Harrier is getting ready to put herself on the line against Kluft, who has swept all before her in the multi-events world since taking European indoor bronze as an emerging teenager in Vienna three years ago.Outdoors, Kluft has won world junior, world senior, Olympic and European heptathlon titles She has also captured the world indoor pentathlon crown. Until he does, he cannot expect the rest of the world to listen to him.”. As Kelly Sotherton got down to work in her double shift at the English Institute of Sport’s indoor arena in Sheffield yesterday, it was inevitable that Carolina would be on her mind. For Great Britain’s other individual track-and-field medal winner from the Athens Olympics (other than the absent Dame Kelly Holmes, that is), the Norwich Union European Indoor Trials and AAA Championships happens to be preparation for the considerable challenge of locking competitive horns with Carolina Kluft, the Swedish golden girl of world athletics, in Birmingham next Friday night and in Madrid on 4 March.
While Dame Kelly is undecided whether to go for gold at the European Indoor Championships in the Spanish capital next month, Sotherton, winner of the heptathlon bronze medal in Athens last summer, is aiming to challenge for a medal in the five-event heptathlon.

His decision caused a political and public outcry, with opposition spokesmen accusing him of hypocrisy.But the EC has now called his bluff. It told the IoS late last week that it had “no intention” of accepting Mr Blair’s revised figures, adding: “Britain submitted its plan, and we are sticking to it.”In a desperate attempt to save face, Mrs Beckett will tomorrow accept the EC’s ruling, but will announce that Britain will not reduce the individual, more relaxed, limits for individual businesses under the revised plan.She believes that industry, despite its protestations, will not need to emit as much pollution as it says. And Peter Ainsworth MP, chairman of the powerful Environmental Audit Committee, added: “Mr Blair’s habit of trying to please everybody all the time has landed him in a predictable mess.”It is time he translated his expressions of concern about climate change into action at home. But if it does, she will crack down on emissions later to ensure that the EC’s ruling is observed.Last night Michael Jack MP, chairman of the parliamentary select committee shadowing Mrs Beckett’s department, described the episode as a “bungle”. Patricia Hewitt’s Department of Trade and Industry took up its cause, leading to a row with Mrs Beckett’s Department for the Environment, which insisted on sticking with the original plan.Eventually Mr Blair personally resolved the row, deciding to increase the limits by 6.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. In July, having heard no more, the EC formally accepted it.However, industry, which had originally pressed for the scheme as the most business-friendly alternative, then put pressure on ministers to relax the limits.

So firms that succeed in reducing their emissions below the limit can make money by selling part of their allowances to those that overshoot. The scheme offers a flexible, and fashionably free-market, way of cutting pollution, but crucially depends on tight limits on the allowances.Under the scheme, each EU country has to submit a national limit to the EC, and then share it out to individual industries and firms.Britain submitted its plan by the deadline of March last year, adding the proviso that it might revise it later. But even before the latest move, China had already done far more than the US to combat the danger of climate change. Although its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, rose rapidly between 1978 and 1996, they then fell sharply as a result of clean-up measures. US government figures suggest emissions dropped by 17 per cent between 1996 and 2000, while the Chinese economy grew by 36 per cent During the same period, US emissions grew by 5 per cent.. Britain’s plans for combating global warming have been rejected by the European Commission for being too lenient to industry, throwing them into disarray. It calls the bluff of President George Bush, who has cited growing pollution in China as justification for refusing to join the Kyoto Protocol, which enters into force on Wednesday.Last week Tony Blair went out of his way to welcome China’s readiness to take “a real lead” in combating global warming.