Little more than a month before the IAAF World Championships, Beijing 2015, a host of leading French athletes will head to the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Monaco on 17 July with high ambitions.

Pole vault world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie will start his 2015 IAAF Diamond League campaign at the Doha 2015 meeting on Friday 15 May, organisers announced on Sunday (15).

Statisticians A Lennart Julin and Mirko Jalava look back on the best jumps performances of the year.

It may not be the last fixture of the 2014 IAAF Combined Events Challenge, but the Decastar meeting in Talence on 20-21 September will be the last opportunity to score points for those in contention of finishing in the top three in the series.

They won the first and last events of the weekend, but in between those victories hosts Africa could not hold off the might of the two strongest teams in the IAAF Continental Cup as Europe lifted the team trophy at the end of two days of competition in Marrakech.

Will Claye went into the competition with IAAF Continental Cup points already on the board, having finished second to Ignisous Gaisah in the long jump on Saturday. The world bronze medallist also started as favourite in this discipline, as the only man in the field to have ventured beyond 17.50m this year.

Three victories for Russia, a pair for France and a long-awaited gold for Barbora Spotakova were the highlights on a chilly but dry third day of action at the European Championships in Zurich on Thursday (14).

The injury and illness trials and tribulations of former world champion Blanka Vlasic are well documented and so it was no surprise that she got one of the biggest cheers of the night when she won the women’s high jump at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Paris on Saturday night (5).

The Herculis meeting, the IAAF Diamond league meeting in Monaco on 19 July, will have the cream of the current generation of French athletes competing in the Stade Louis II once again.