Guerrouj Sets Indoor 1,500-Meter Record

This time a track record fell and not Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco.

El Guerrouj trimmed nearly three seconds off the world indoor 1,500-meter record held since 1991 by Algeria’s Noureddine Morceli, running 3 minutes, 31.17 seconds Sunday at Stuttgart, Germany.

The record was 3:34.16.

Haile Gebreselassie of Ethiopia also went under the previous record, finishing second at 3:32.39.

“I was prepared and I’m happy that a huge champion like Noureddine Morceli could be so clearly beaten,” El Guerrouj said.

Morceli was the Olympic champion in the 1,500 last summer at Atlanta. In that race, El Guerrouj was challenging the leaders when he hit Morceli’s heel and tumbled through the field of runners during the final lap.

Auto Racing

A seven-driver team nursed a sick Riley & Scott MK III to win the Rolex 24 Hours sports car endurance race at Daytona Beach, Fla.

The Ford-powered car was trailing white smoke with nearly an hour to go in the race.

“It was smoking and making noise and I thought for sure that it was in a death spiral,” Butch Leitzinger said. “I thought it was going to blow up any minute. I didn’t believe I was going to get it to the end until there was about 10 minutes to go.”

Swimming

For the second time in five days, Han Xue of China broke her short-course world record for the 50-meter breaststroke at Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Han, 15, was timed at 30.77 seconds, breaking the 30.88 record she set Wednesday at Glasgow, Scotland.

Winter Sports

Claudia Riegler of New Zealand won her third World Cup slalom race of the season at Laax, Switzerland.

Riegler was timed in 1:20.75 in a final tuneup for the World Championships, which begin today at Sestriere, Italy.

Italy’s Lara Magoni was second.

Three-time Olympian Hilary Lindh heads a group of eight women selected for the U.S. team at Sestriere.

Lindh, a downhill skier from Juneau, Alaska, was joined on the women’s team by Kirsten Clark of Raymond, Maine; Megan Gerety of Anchorage, Alaska; Kristina Koznick of Burnsville, Minn.; Katie Monahan of Aspen, Colo; Shaina Mulkern of Magnolia, Mass.; Tasha Nelson of Mound, Minn.; and Shannon Nobis of Park City, Utah.

Chosen for the Nordic team were Ryan Heckman, Dave Jarrett and Todd Lodwick, all of Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Tim Tetreault of Norwich, Vt.

A Swiss medal sweep at the four-man bobsled world championships degenerated into chaos when the top three teams were disqualified for equipment violations at St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Germany, which finished fourth, was at first declared the winner, but organizers then relented and said the Swiss would remain on top pending a final decision.

No nation ever swept all three medals at the world championships since the event started in 1924.

Georg Hackl of Germany, two-time Olympic gold medalist and current world champion, used an opening-run track record to win a men’s World Cup luge event at Winterberg, Germany.

Hackl’s first run of 50.573 seconds broke the previous track record by more than three-tenths of a second.

Sergey Klevchenya of Russia won the men’s overall title and Franziska Schenk of Germany swept all four women’s races in the World Sprint Speedskating Championships at Hamar, Norway.

Miscellany

Top-seeded Goran Ivanisevic of Croatia defeated Greg Rusedski of Britain, 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 7-6 (8-6), to win the Croatian Indoor tennis tournament, an event Ivanisevic runs with two partners in Zagreb.

The San Francisco 49ers have unveiled plans for a 75,000-seat stadium at Candlestick Point that would be the cornerstone of a giant $525-million sports and entertainment complex, and the most expensive private development in the history of San Francisco, the San Francisco Examiner said.

Planned for completion by fall of the year 2000, the project also would be the first time a professional sports franchise has incorporated a retail-entertainment complex of such magnitude.

Tom Draper made 34 saves and John Byce scored twice for the Long Beach Ice Dogs, who defeated Phoenix, 6-0, for their 18th consecutive home victory.

Olympics

Trevor Dohnt, the general manager of Tennis Australia, was hired as group manager of sports for the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.

He will be responsible for the day-to-day management in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics.