Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim will command spotlight in London Sunday when the high jump world champion will make his first Diamond League appearance in 13 months with the IAAF World Championships all set to be hosted at Doha’s Khalifa International Stadium in September.
Also hoping to brush aside a brief injury-forced blip this season will be Abderrahman Samba, the Asian 400m hurdles champion, who was unbeaten in the Diamond League last season.
Barshim, the 2017 World Athlete of the Year, will go up against world leader Ilya Ivanyuk, who topped 2.33m ten days ago in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, the same venue where the Qatari tore the ligaments on his left ankle during an attempt on a would-be world record of 2.46m last year.
The 28-year-old resumed training in April this and in a low-key comeback, he topped 2.27m in Sopot, Poland, last month.
Syria’s Majd Eddin Ghazal, who took bronze at the IAAF World Championships London 2017, a competition won by Barshim, and picked up the gold in the Asian championships in April, is also on the slate.
Samba made a roaring return from injury earlier this month, finishing second in the men’s 400m in Monaco in 45 seconds. His personal best is 44.60 seconds which he ran in South Africa to kick-start his build-up to the World Championships.
Samba won the 400m flat in Pretoria, before unsurprisingly running away with 400m hurdles gold at the Asian Championships in April.
In ominous fashion, he opened his Diamond League season in Shanghai with a 47.27 second effort to win the 400m hurdles gold before injury forced a break.
Also at the Anniversary Games in London Stadium, double Olympic 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will go head-to-head with British sprint star Dina Asher-Smith.
Jamaica’s Fraser-Pryce, 32, is returning to a happy hunting ground, having retained her Olympics 100m title in the London stadium in 2012.
Fraser-Pryce, who is returning to her best form after clocking a joint world-leading time of 10.73sec in Kingston in June, also faces world indoor champion Murielle Ahoure and world 200m champion Dafne Schippers.
British record-holder Asher-Smith, 23, set a season’s best time of 10.91sec in finishing second behind Fraser-Pryce at the Lausanne Diamond League meeting earlier this month.
In the women’s 200m, the star attraction is Elaine Thompson of Jamaica, who won a 100m and 200m sprint double at the Rio Olympics.
With the US trials for the world championships taking place the following week, no Americans will take part in either the men’s or women’s 100m at the two-day meeting, which is part of the Diamond League series.
The men’s 100m pits former Jamaican world champion Yohan Blake against Canadian star Andre De Grasse, who has struggled with illness and injury since winning three Olympic medals in 2016.
Britain’s Zharnel Hughes and South African Akani Simbine, who have both gone under 10 seconds this year, are also in the field along with James Ellington, racing for the first time since August 2016 following a motorbike crash that left him with career-threatening injuries.
Greek Olympic pole vault champion Katerina Stefanidi and double Olympic triple jump champion Christian Taylor of the United States will all be competing in London as they prepare to defend their world titles in Doha later this year.
The women’s long jump will see Germany’s world leader Malaika Mihambo go head-to-head with four-time world champion Brittney Reese of the United States and British heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
Kenya’s Olympic and world champion Faith Kipyegon leads a women’s 1,500m field that also includes Britain’s Laura Muir, who has the third-fastest time of the year over the distance.
Dutch long-distance runner Sifan Hassan heads up the 5,000m after she broke the women’s mile record in Monaco last week.
In the men’s 5,000m, Norway’s double European champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen will take on Ethiopia’s Hagos Gebrhiwet, who is third quickest in the world this year.
Aged just 18, Ingebrigsten set the world alight last year as he won double European gold over 1500m and 5,000m.
After London there are Diamond League events in Birmingham, Paris, Zurich and Brussels in the lead-up to the world championships in Doha, which start on September 27.
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