Elaine looks to keep good form going at Doha Diamond League
World Leader Elaine Thompson-Herah will be going after back-to-back wins when she lines up in the women’s 100m at today’s Doha Wanda Diamond League meeting at the Doha Sports Club in Qatar.
The meeting was originally scheduled for April and is traditionally one of the first in the series, but was moved to a later date due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The meet has attracted a number of the world’s top athletes and six reigning World champions and three reigning Olympic champions will take part, a release from the organisers said.
Among the stars will be double World-record holder in the men’s pole vault Mondo Duplantis of Sweden, who added the outdoor record in Rome when he cleared 6.15m to the indoor record 6.18m that he set in Scotland.
He will be competing in Doha for the first time since his shock silver medal in the World Championships last year and will get the chance to avenge that defeat when he faces World champion Sam Kendricks of the USA.
Jamaican Julian Forte will also compete in the meet and will take part in the men’s 200m where he will face veteran American Michael Rodgers, France’s Christophe Lemaitre, Barbados’ Mario Burke, Arthur Cisse of the Ivory Coast and Qatar’s Mohamed Abdelaziz.
Forte has run just one 200m all season, running 20.71 seconds (-2.9m/s) at Jamaica College in early July.
The women’s 100m will be one of the featured events and Thompson-Herah, the 2016 Olympic Games double sprint champion, will line up against a number of women she beat last week when she clocked 10.85 seconds in Rome to move from second to first on the World Athletics rankings ahead of compatriot Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
American Aleia Hobbs and Marie-Josee Ta Lou, who were second and third, respectively, in Rome — both running season-best times — will be at the starting line again today, as well as Thompson-Herah’s training partner at the MVP Track Club, Anthonique Strachan of the Bahamas.
At a pre-race press conference held on Wednesday, Thompson-Herah said she welcomed the chance to compete against some of the best in the world after a series of races in Jamaica.
“We had some races in Jamaica, but the competition was not as good, so I welcome the chance to run in Rome and here [Doha],” she said.
