Nigeria’s Blessing Okagbare will battle with two of Jamaica’s greatest ever women sprinters in afield bustling with a glittering array of world and Olympic champions at the 2015 Shanghai Diamond League meeting on May 17, the IAAF Diamond League meeting organisers announced yesterday.
Commonwealth champion, Okagbare will line up against Olympic gold medallist and triple world champion, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, and her compatriot, Veronica Campbell-Brown in a 100m clash at the second meeting on this year’s Diamond League calendar.
Campbell-Brown, the Olympic Games 200m champion in 2004 and 2008, won the season-long Diamond Race over 100m last year and will be keen to get her 2015 season off to a flying start against Fraser-Pryce, who won three gold medals at the 2013 IAAF World Championships and won the 100m at this meeting two years ago.
Okagbare produced a dazzling double at this meeting 12 months ago when she won the long jump and 200m, and the multi-talented Nigerian will be looking for maximum points again to kick off this summer’s campaign ahead of the IAAF World Championships in Beijing.
The women’s 100m will be just one of many highlights in a meeting packed with world and Olympic medallists, including at least six London 2012 Olympic Games gold medallists and six reigning world champions.
The men’s 110m hurdles always attracts huge interest in Shanghai and 2015 will be no different with 2012 Olympic champion Aries Merritt against all three 2013 World Championships medallists: fellow Americans David Oliver and Ryan Wilson, the Moscow gold and silver medallists respectively, plus Russia’s Sergey Shubenkov.
China’s Xie Wenjun will face strong competition in his home country but will be trying to fill the vaccum left by Tuesday’s reirement of the hurdling icon Liu Xiang. There’s another clash between current world and Olympic champions in the men’s long jump where 2012 Olymic gold medallist Greg Rutherford faces Russia’s Aleksandr Menkov, who took the world crown on home soil two years ago.
