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The Rome Diamond League will take place on Friday and the event has attracted some of the world’s finest athletes, setting up epic battles in various races.
Attention shifts to the Rome Diamond League on Friday with a number of top stars set to grace the meeting, including Olympics champions Faith Kipyegon, Winfred Yavi and Letsile Tebogo.
That sets up top battles that will be witnessed in the Italian capital with the runners out to secure slots in the Diamond League season finale in Brussels in top gear.
So, which races will witness hotly-contested battles in Rome?
Women’s 1,500m
Triple Olympics champion Faith Kipyegon will return to the meeting where she set her first world 1500m record, though this year’s edition has returned to its traditional home in Rome as opposed to Florence.
Kipyegon broke her own Olympics record with 3:51.29, just two seconds shy of the world record of 3:49.04 she set at the Paris Diamond League in July, for her third crown.
She’ll be joined in Rome by Jess Hull, the Australian who followed her home in both her world record run and at the Olympic Games. World indoor champion Freweyni Hailu and fellow Ethiopian Birke Haylom are also in the field, while Olympic 10,000m silver medallist Nadia Battocletti will also be competing.
Women’s 3,000m steeplechase
Kenyan-born Winfred Yavi of Bahrain will seek to assert her dominance in the 3,000m steeplechase and she is up against the women she beat at the Olympics.
Ugandan Peruth Chemutai, who finished second to Yavi at the Olympics, and Kenya’s Faith Cherotich, who was third at the Paris Games, are also in the race, setting up an epic battle.
With a personal best of 8:50.66 recorded at the 2023 Eugene Diamond League and season’s best of 8:52.76, when winning her Olympics gold, Yavi is hot favourite to lower the meeting record of 9:00.71.
Men’s 5,000m
The men’s 5,000m is of a similarly high standard as five of the top six finishers from the Olympic final will take to the start line.
Kenya’s Ronald Kwemoi, the Olympics silver medallist and USA’s Grant Fisher, the Olympic silver medallists, will battle for top honours with world leader Hagos Gebrhiwet of Ethiopia, European 10,000m champion Dominic Lobalu, Ethiopian teenager Biniam Mehary, Canada’s Mohammed Ahmed and Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha.
The Ethiopians did not have a great Olympics and will feel the meeting in Rome is the perfect chance to right those wrongs, giving fans a race to remember.
Men’s 100m
Even with Olympics silver medallist Kishane Thompson pulling out of yet another Diamond League meeting, the 100m race is still full of superstars.
Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, who won the 200m title in Paris in an African record of 19.46 after placing sixth in the 100m final in a national record of 9.86, is among the headline acts after back-to-back wins in 200m in Lausanne and Silesia.
The 2022 world champion and Olympic bronze medallist Fred Kerley is also in the line-up, as is 2021 Olympic champion and home favourite Marcell Jacobs, world indoor champion Christian Coleman, world indoor bronze medallist Ackeem Blake and Africa’s fastest man Ferdinand Omanyala of Kenya.
Women’s 100m
Jamaican record-holder Ackera Nugent got the better of Olympic champion Masai Russell in Silesia last weekend, and they’ll renew their rivalry in the women’s 100m hurdles in Rome.
It won’t be just a two-woman race, though, as the line-up also features Olympic silver medallist Cyrena Samba-Mayela, USA’s Alaysha Johnson, Swiss record-holder Ditaji Kambundji, former world record-holder Kendra Harrison and Nadine Visser of the Netherlands.
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