With about 90 seconds to go in the women’s 3000m at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Doha on Friday (25), it looked as though Hellen Obiri would register a rare defeat in the Qatari capital.
It may have been a far-from-normal season, but the Wanda Diamond League will end on a high in Doha on Friday (25) with what is quite possibly the deepest line-up seen in any discipline this year.
In the country where ‘Mondo’ means ‘world’, Swedish wunderkind Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis confirmed his status as the world’s greatest pole vaulter, jumping higher than anyone ever has in an outdoor stadium, 6.15m, at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Rome on Thursday (17).
.World-leading marks were set in six track events at the Prefontaine Classic, but it was the women’s 3000m that produced the greatest set of marks at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Stanford on Sunday (30).
The greatest field of women distance runners ever assembled on US soil will step to the starting line for the Prefontaine Classic 3000m when the IAAF Diamond League heads to Stanford on 30 June.
A brilliant brace of gold medals from Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Laura Muir made it a memorable opening night for the hosts at the European Indoor Championships in Glasgow on Friday (1).
An early-season meeting is bound to have a raft of world-leading times, but at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix on Saturday (26) there were more than a few hotly-contested events and a few upsets to make the season interesting as the 2019 IAAF World Indoor Tour got underway.
Elimination racing in track and field is far from new. But it was new to Mohammed Ahmed on Sunday – and it felt, well, tough.
Had Team Americas not already played, and won, on their joker for the men’s events on the second day, then Paul Chelimo and Mohammed Ahmed would have done them proud in the men’s 3000m, where they took first and second place respectively in a race where the elimination element loomed huge.
A Championship record of 8:27.58 in the women’s 3000 by Sifan Hassan helped Team Europe to share the overall points with Team Africa in an event where the latter had played their women’s joker for the day.
Bahrain’s Birhanu Balew, representing Asia-Pacific, and US runner Paul Chelimo, representing the Americas, look the two likely leaders here. Both men chased home Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha in the hottest 3000m race of the season so far at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Rabat, with Balew finishing second in 7:34.26 – the second fastest time run this year – and Chelimo fourth, both in the race and the list, with 7:34.83.
This event will bring together the two athletes who produced what was arguably the most dramatic conclusion to any women’s distance event this season, Hellen Obiri of Kenya and Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands.