An impressive homestretch blaze brought Rhasidat Adeleke into second place at the Shanghai Diamond League meeting on Saturday, the Dublin sprinter clocking 22.72 seconds in another high-quality 200m field.
It was the second of the Diamond League meetings this year, and Adeleke was making her first step onto the international circuit, using this race as a tune-up ahead of the World Athletics Relays in Guangzhou next weekend, where her focus will be on the mixed and women’s 4x400m
Her start may need still need some work, but Adeleke powered down the last 100m, passing two runners, to nail second, victory going to Anavia Battle from the US, who ran a season best of 22.38, and had also won in the opening Diamond League meeting in Xiamen a week. The wind was a near negligible +0.5 m/s.
For Adeleke there will be other positives, the 22-year-old only arriving in China on Thursday from her training base in Austin Texas, and the focus this month was always going to be her 400m efforts at the world relays.
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Adeleke had clocked 22.57 for the 200m in her first individual race of the season over 200m in Florida last month, at the same meeting where she set her Irish record of 22.34 two seasons ago.
From here, Adeleke will join her Irish team mates who are currently training in Hong Kong ahead of the World Relays; Adeleke is named in both the mixed 4x400m and women’s 4x400m, playing a central role on both those teams qualifying for Paris last summer. The top 14 in each event in Guangzhou are automatic qualifiers for Tokyo.
Earlier, Brian Fay ran a season best of 13:12.60 to finish 10th in the men’s 5,000m, that race won by Beriha Aregawi from Ethiopia in 12:50.45.
Meanwhile Andrew Coscoran is in line for the biggest payday of his career after a brilliant win over 3,000m at the second Grand Slam Track meeting in Miami, Florida, his time of 8:17.56 including a last 200m of 25.78.
The Dublin runner, one of the challengers set up against the racers, moved from fourth to first inside the last 50m, getting the better of Grant Fischer of the US, the two-time Olympic medallist who took second in 8:17.60, and Britain’s George Mills.
Coscoran will now race the 5,000m on Sunday, and another win there would earn him the €100,000 prize that comes with each event category winner.
With a total prize purse of $12.6 million, for year one Grand Slam Track is focussing on six performance categories, each combining two events, from short sprints to long distance. This makes for just 96 athletes per meeting, the 48 contracted “racers” and 48 “challengers”, with eight athletes in each race, then one overall winner per category based on cumulative points.
If he can handle the searing heat forecast for Miami on Sunday, Coscoran will have made his Grand Small debut a highly valuable exercise.
