SILICON VALLEY, California (CMC):

Jamaican sprint stars Veronica Campbell and Asafa Powell secured top-10 positions as Tyson Gay and Meseret Defar snatched the No.1 spots in the Track and Field News magazine's poll for the top performers this year.

American Gay was an overwhelming No.1 in the poll for the top male athlete, while Ethiopia's Defar was also virtually unchallenged as the leading female.

Campbell, the 100-metre gold medallist at the Osaka World Championship, took ninth spot in the women's poll and Powell, whose sizzling world-record equalling run in Rieti was voted the top performance at the IAAF awards, is No.5 on the men's list.

A 34-member international voting panel awarded men's world 100-metre champion Gay 328 total votes as he finished ahead of the U.S.A.'s 400-metre world champion Jeremy Wariner (279). Ethiopia's distance runner Kenenisa Bekele, with 228 votes, was third and Panama's log jump world champion Irving Saladino (180) took fourth. Powell had 174 votes for fifth.

Top ten

American men dominated the voting with world 1,500 and 5,000-metre champion Bernard Lagat, sixth with 130 points and world shot put champion Reese Hoffa, eighth with 109 points, also finishing in the top 10.

Gay was given 26 first-place selections as he collected a 96.5 per cent score in the 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 voting system. The double gold medallist at the World Championships also ranked No.1 in both the 100 and 200 metres in the magazine's by-event merit rankings for the 2007 season.

Haile Gebrselassie's world record marathon of two hours, four minutes, and 26 seconds was selected as the men's Performance of the Year.

Distance-running star Defar finished the season unbeaten and led the 2007 Women's Athlete of the Year poll with 319 votes.

Number one ranking

The 23-year-old Defar earned 24 votes for No.1. She ended the campaign World-Ranked No.1 at both the 3,000 and 5,000-metre distances.

Her world-record 5,000-metre clocking of 14 minutes, 16.63 seconds was voted the women's Performance of the Year.

Closest to Defar in the poll were Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva (284) and Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasic (274).

American sprinter Allyson Felix was fourth at 227 votes and Swedish heptathlon star Carolina Kluft (205) fifth. Campbell tallied 67 votes for ninth place.