The wiry Qatari, who has jumped higher than anyone in history except Cuban world record holder Javier Sotomayor, breezed through yesterday’s qualification, clearing the automatic qualifying height of 2.31 metres with the greatest of ease.
Barshim, whose only global title came at the world indoor championships in 2014, demonstrated why he is a warm favourite to win his first major outdoor crown following silver and bronze at the last two Olympics.
The 26-year-old, who has an Asian record best of 2.43m, is one of six athletes who cleared 2.31 but the only one to go through the morning without failing on a single jump.
His main danger again looks set to come from Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko, who beat him to the 2013 title, while Danil Lysenko, competing under a neutral flag following the Russian Federation’s ban, also qualified easily after just one failure.
There was delight for the home crowd as Robbie Grabarz confirmed his place in the final amid plenty of cheering by going over 2.31m at the last attempt.
Countback determined the rest to advance. Majd Eddin Ghazal of Syria, neutral athlete Ilya Ivanyuk and Bryan McBride of the US didn’t miss until topping out at 2.31m. They’ll be joined by Germany’s Eike Onnen, Edgar Rivera of Mexico and China’s Wang Yu.
Notable among the non-qualifiers is Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi whose comeback effort from injury and a pair of surgeries ran out of time. Nonetheless, he jumped a season’s best of 2.29m.
Erik Kynard of the United States, who won the Olympic silver in this arena five years ago, had to pull out injured after one unsuccessful attempt at his opening height of 2.17m.
“Obviously, the main goal this season is the World championships in London, but it’s not the only goal. This season I want to have a different and specific approach for every single competition. Each time I want to be successful, I want to be excellent,” Barshim had said after winning his fourth Diamond League event in Paris with an effort of 2.35m earlier this year.
“So far, I feel really comfortable with my running and that’s very important. I can jump at full approach with eight steps. I haven’t really changed a lot of things in my training this year, just some small touch,” he added.
The win in Paris gave Barshim a clean sweep of all the Diamond League high jump events that have been held this year.
The Qatari opened the season with a win in Doha where he jumped 2.36m. Barshim then headed to Shanghai and here a 2.33-metre jump was enough to hand him the gold.
After this the 28-year-old produced what has been his best show this year in Oslo. Barshim cleared an impressive 2.38 metres to win gold and also register a meet record. In that event too he had defeated Ukrainian Bondarenko, like in Paris.
