Eleven recently crowned individual European champions from the Berlin 2018 European Athletics Championships will be competing in the Brussels Diamond League on Friday (31) evening, the second of the two Diamond League finals.
In many events on the programme, two - or even three - of the medallists from the European Championships will be in action. Will the European champions further assert their dominance or will the lesser medallists have a little extra to prove in the fledgling weeks of the summer campaign?
The programme kicks off this afternoon with the women’s shot put taking place away from the main arena at the Grand Palace in the city centre. The line-up features Poland’s Paulina Guba who defeated reigning two-time champion Christina Schwanitz from Germany with the penultimate throw of the final but they might both be overshadowed by world champion Gong Lijiao from China, who won the Asian Games title in Jakarta earlier this week.
For many, the most keenly awaited event on the programme is the men’s pole vault after one of the greatest ever competitions in Berlin where four men attempted six metres. Two of them were successful - Sweden’s Armand Duplantis and Timur Morgunov - and while the latter is coming off another good victory in Zurich last night with 5.91m, European champion Duplantis was a notable absentee. The line-up also includes European bronze medallist Renaud Lavillenie and reigning world champion Sam Kendricks.
Lavillenie still holds the record for winning the most Diamond League titles - seven in total from 2010 until 2016 - but Sandra Perkovic could match the Frenchman’s haul in the discus. Perkovic won her fifth successive European discus title in Berlin last month and is unbeaten in over a year.
The men’s discus should be a much closer affair with Lithuania’s Andrius Gudzius and Sweden’s Daniel Stahl - first and second at the European Championships and at the World Championships last summer - among the main protagonists. Stahl recently eclipsed the world lead which had stood to Jamaica’s Fedrick Dacres at 69.67m with 69.72m at the Swedish Championships.
While 23 centimetres separated Gudzius and Stahl in the discus, a mere 0.002 separated France’s Pascal Martinot-Lagarde and Sergey Shubenkov in the 110m hurdles in Berlin. Shubenkov will be racing for the first time since the European Championships and is the favourite if he can recapture his early season form which took him to within 0.01 of Colin Jackson’s European record of 12.91.
One head-to-head that didn’t materialise in Berlin due to a timetable clash was the middle distance match-up between Laura Muir and Sifan Hassan. Muir and Hassan will clash over 1500m in Brussels, although Hassan might be somewhat heavy-legged as she will be racing over 5000m in Zurich tonight as well.
Other European champions in action in Brussels are Germans Malaika Mihambo (long jump) and Mateusz Przybylko (high jump) and Portugal’s Nelson Evora while Nafissatou Thiam - who completed the full set of major heptathlon titles in Berlin - will compete in the high jump, an event in which she has cleared 2.01m.