SHANGHAI: Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar won his high jump showdown with Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko with a season’s best 2.38m as World and Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce finished a poor fifth in the Shanghai Diamond League 100m.
Barshim and Bondarenko dominated the event last season.
Bondarenko, the world champion, reached 2.42m last June before Barshim produced 2.43m in Brussels last September to clinch the Diamond League title.
Barhsim yesterday took the world lead from Bondarenko and the early points in Shanghai yesterday (17) in what should be a year-long rivalry through the rest of the IAAF Diamond League.
Indeed, Bondarenko was the only one of the two to attempt a height above 2.40m.
He had to, as two misses at 2.38m saw him trailing Barshim who sailed over it first time. When he missed his one and only attempt at 2.41m, Barshim opted not to go any higher.
Barshim won at 2.38m, a world lead one centimetre higher than Bondarenko had jumped at the IAAF World Challenge meeting in Kawasaki a week ago.
Bondarenko was second at 2.32m – he had passed 2.35m as the top two played cat-and-mouse – ahead of China’s Zhang Guowei on countback at the same height.
Afterwards Barshim explained why he did not attempt to go higher.
“It’s too early,” he said. “This was my first competition and my body is not ready yet. I can jump it, but I don’t want to put my body under that stress so early in the season. The target here in Shanghai was to win.”
Bondarenko was not that close at either 2.38m or his one attempt at 2.41m. Barshim, too, had a little wobble, requiring two attempts at his second height of 2.29m and giving the bar a decent whack on the successful jump.
Barshim agreed he had struggled a little early.
“I needed three or four jumps to get the rhythm,” he said.
Also yesterday, in the season’s second Diamond League meeting, David Oliver stormed to victory in the 110m hurdles, and Almaz Ayana won the women’s 5,000m in a world-leading 14min 14.32sec.
Olympic title-holder Kirani James took out the 400m in a clear statement ahead of the August world championships in Beijing.
But Fraser-Pryce suffered a big loss in her first 100m of the season, behind Nigerian winner Blessing Okagbare and Jamaican team-mate Veronica Campbell-Brown, who was fourth.
“The feeling is OK,” said 28-year-old Fraser-Pryce, who now has three months to find form before the world championships. “I am looking forward to my next race. What comes, comes.”
Okagbare, who won the 200m and the long jump at last year’s meet in Shanghai, was ecstatic at her victory.
“It is not easy to compete with the best in the world but I won,” she said. “Shanghai loves me and the track loves me.” Watched by recently retired Chinese great Liu Xiang, America’s David Oliver clattered four barriers in the 110m hurdles but still managed to beat a top-class field.
The powerful world champion clocked 13.17 to finish two-hundredths ahead of Cuba’s Orlando Ortega with Aries Merritt, the Olympic champion and world record-holder, third.
“Although it is a season’s best, I think I can run faster,” America’s Oliver said. “My main goal is to win Beijing but also to win the Diamond race.”
In the 5,000m, Ethiopia’s Ayana ran a stunning race to clock the third best time in history, threatening compatriot Tirunesh Dibaba’s 2008 world record of 14:11.15.
“I didn’t know I was so close to the world record,” she said.
“During the race, I went faster and faster. I was surprised that my body could do that.”
Ayana, who led after five laps in Shanghai and broke away not long after the half-way point, said she would make an attempt at the record at the world championships. AGENCIES
