It has been 13 years, but the women’s javelin returns to Oslo’s Bislett Stadium for the 50th anniversary of the ExxonMobil Bislett Games, part of the 2015 IAAF Diamond League, on 11 June.
Barbora Spotakova and Christina Obergfoll headline a deep world-class javelin field at the 2015 IAAF Diamond League meeting in Eugene on 30 May, after organisers for the famous Prefontaine Classic announced the line up for the this event on Monday (30).
A look back at the best performances across the 2013 IAAF World Challenge.
The organisers of the IAAF World Challenge meeting in Berlin couldn’t have hoped for a better start. In the first round of the first event of the day, Maria Abakumova improved the Javelin meeting record to 68.82m. But the Russian wasn’t finished yet.
Meseret Defar’s outstanding 5000m win over her compatriot Tirunesh Dibaba and Bohdan Bondarenko bringing the Letzigrund Stadium to a standstill as he attempted again to improve the High Jump World record provided the highlights of the first of this season’s IAAF Diamond League finals on Thursday (29).
Javelin throwers Tero Pitkamaki and Maria Abakumova competed in two different meetings on German soil on Sunday (25), but the end result for both athletes was the same as they produced the best throws in the world since 2011.
Ethiopia’s Meseret Defar would have preferred to have raced over 5000m, the distance at which she has won consecutive Olympic and World titles, but she made the very best of the scheduled 3000m race at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Stockholm to win in 8:30.29, the world’s fastest time this year, on Thursday (22).
After so many near misses at the IAAF World Championships and Olympic Games, Germany’s Christina Obergfoll was determined not to let the gold medal slip from her grasp on this occasion and fulfilled her role as the favourite with a winning throw of 69.05m.
Sunday, the ninth and closing day of the IAAF World Championships held in Moscow at the Luzhniki Stadium, will bring in bits of everything: throwing (the women’s Javelin final), jumping (the men’s Triple Jump), sprinting (the men’s and women’s 4x100m Relays) and distance running (the men’s 1500m and women’s 800m finals.) And, of course, host-country favourites and Usain Bolt, the running themes of the championships.
Russia’s defending women’s Javelin champion Maria Abakumova showed that she will not be giving up her title without a fight and has arrived at these IAAF World Championships in terrific form as she threw 69.09m with her first throw in Friday morning’s qualifying rounds.
After being so long in the shadow of other throwers at major championships, not least Czech Republic’s London 2012 Olympic Games champion and World record holder Barbora Spotakova who will be missing in Moscow because of maternity leave, Germany’s Christina Obergfoll will possibly never have a better chance of taking a global title.
Six of Russia’s nine reigning World champions will defend their titles in front of a home crowd at the 2013 IAAF World Championships in Moscow from 10-18 August.