After lowering his colours to Sam Kendricks and Renaud Lavillenie at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Shanghai on Saturday, world champion Shawn Barber will be hoping for a change of fortune at the IAAF World Challenge meeting in Beijing on Wednesday (18).

China’s very own high jump hero Zhang Guowei is set to star at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Shanghai on 14 May, where he will come face-to-face with Bogdan Bondarenko, organisers announced on Friday (9).

There were no records set in the high jump on Sunday as the bar never go higher than 2.36m, but the medals were decided in an unprecedented, as far as the World Championships were concerned, three-way jump off won by Canada’s Derek Drouin.

Hosts China have assembled 73 athletes on their team for the IAAF World Championships, Beijing 2015, their largest ever squad at a world championships, spearheaded by a group of elite race walkers including Olympic champion Chen Ding and world record-holder Liu Hong.

Pole vaulters Li Ling and Zhang Wei provided the highlights of the three-day 2015 Chinese Championships at the National Stadium, which is almost better known as the Bird’s Nest stadium, on Monday (29).

High hopes of a high jump world record in Oslo were effectively blown away by a fitful wind which troubled athletes both on the track and in the field during the IAAF Diamond League meeting which was also the 50th Anniversary running of the ExxonMobil Bislett Games.

Four world leads highlighted the IAAF World Challenge meeting in Beijing, and there was an attempt on Zhu Jianhua’s iconic national record in the high jump by Zhang Guowei on Wednesday night (20).

Mutaz Essa Barshim will return to the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene on 30 May, an IAAF Diamond League meeting, where he set the high jumping world on fire in 2013.

This year has been dubbed by many as the ‘Year of the High Jumper’ and though much of the attention has been focused on Mutaz Barshim and Bogdan Bondarenko, lurking in the background during 2014 has been Zhang Guowei.

There were some wobbles at the 2.16m opening height for some of the pedigree jumpers in the field.

The IAAF World Challenge moves on to Beijing for the fifth leg of the 2013 series on Tuesday, and the second Asian stop on the 15-meeting circuit, with the organisers hoping that the success of long jumper Li Jinzhe at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Shanghai at the weekend will bring in the crowds on Tuesday (21).

The European and US indoor seasons may almost be at an end but in China their 2013 calendar got off to a great start in Nanjing wth one Asian indoor record and five national records at the two day meeting on Wednesday and Thursday (6/7).