Injured heptathlon ace Kluft pulls out of Olympics

Former Olympic heptathlon champion Carolina Kluft has pulled out of the London Games with a hamstring injury. The 29-year-old Swede, who won heptathlon gold in Athens in 2004 and was world champion three times, was due to compete in the long jump in London, having switched to concentrate on that event prior to the 2008 Beijing Games, BBC News reported. She picked up the injury at a small regional meeting in Kuortane, Finland. “I don’t want to go to London with these kind of preparations,” she said. Kluft announced in 2011 that she planned to retire later this year. “I’m becoming saturated with sport and want to do something different,” she told Swedish radio in 2011. Kluft, heptathlon world champion in 2003, 2005 and 2007, gave up the event in 2008 and chose to compete in the long jump and triple jump in Beijing. She finished ninth in the long jump and failed to reach the final in the triple jump. She missed the 2009 World Championships, also with a hamstring injury, but finished fifth in the long jump at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, South Korea.