New Delhi: Javelin ace Neeraj Chopra and steeplechaser Avinash Sable will be India’s representatives at the season-ending Diamond League Final that begins in Brussels on Friday, making it the first occasion of two Indians making the cut for the elite competition.
Chopra, who won a silver medal at last month’s Paris Olympics with a throw of 89.45m, will be up against a competitive field comprising of Paris bronze medallist Anderson Peters of Grenada and Germany’s Julian Weber. Sable, meanwhile, will run alongside the likes of world No.5 Mohamed Amin Jhinaoui of Tunisia and Paris bronze medallist Abraham Kibiwot of Kenya.
While the 26-year-old Chopra will be looking to end the year with his second Diamond League Finals trophy less than a month after nailing a season’s best effort of 89.49m at the Lausanne Diamond League, Sable would like to cap an underwhelming season on a high.
India’s leading 3000m steeplechase athlete has competed only sparingly this season and finished 11th at the Paris Games, becoming the first Indian ever to make the final of his event. In July this year, the 29-year-old rewrote his own national record at the Paris Diamond League, clocking a time of 8:09.91m.
Post Olympics, Sable turned up at the Silesia Diamond League in Poland and finished 14th with a below-par time of 8:29.96m. Sable finished 14th in the Diamond League standings with three points from two meetings. However, four athletes ranked higher than him — Lamecha Girma (injured) of Ethiopia, Geordie Beamish of New Zealand, Ryuji Mura of Japan, and Hillary Bor of the USA — pulled out, allowing him to make the top-12 cut-off.
Among the seven javelin throwers who will line up at the King Baudouin Stadium on Saturday evening, only Peters has a better personal best and season’s best than Chopra. Peters also won the Zurich Diamond League earlier this month (85.72m) — an event that Chopra missed — and is the only thrower in the fray to have logged a 90m-plus throw this year.
In a regular season, the pre-competition talk around Chopra would be around his impending 90m throw but given his prolonged struggle with a groin strain that also affected his performance at the Olympics, it will be interesting to note how much the Indian is willing to stretch in the season-ender. He is expected to see a doctor after the Brussels meet to find a permanent solution for a niggle that has troubled him for almost two years.
Chopra made the Diamond League Final after finishing fourth in the overall standings with 14 points from his two second-place finishes in Doha (88.36m) and Lausanne legs of the competition. He finished two points behind the 2023 Diamond League Finals champion Czech Republic Jakub Vadlech. Peters and Weber took the top two spots with 29 and 21 points respectively.
Each Diamond League season finale champion is awarded a ‘Diamond Trophy’, $30,000 prize money and a wild card for next year’s World Athletics Championships. The runner-up gets $12,000.
This will be the first occasion of a Diamond League Final being spread over two days. Among the international stars competing across 32 disciplines, pole vault world record holder Armand DuPlantis, American sprint queen Sha’Carri Richardson, and superstar hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone are expected to draw significant attention.
