Local athletics fans are sure to enjoy a thrilling night on 15 May at the fields of Qatar SC, with numerous star names topping every event, including the IAAF’s Athlete of the Year Renaud Lavillenie, as well as double Olympic gold medallist and long-distance world champion Mo Farah. Fans will also have the chance to cheer on Qatar’s athletics team, made up of a group of talented young athletes.
Mutaz Essa Barshim, “the face of Qatari athletics,” may be absent from this year’s athletics event in Qatar because the men’s high jump has been left off the championship’s programme. But most of the rest of Qatar’s leading athletics stars are poised to make their mark at the grand curtain-raiser of the 2015 IAAF Diamond League season.
Let’s start with the 100m, where Qatar is represented by Femi Ogunode, the Asian title holder and record holder with a time of 9.93, who is unofficially ranked second among Qatari athletes in the sport. Ogunode – 24 years old and a 60m bronze medallist at the 2014 World Indoor Championships, and five-time Asian sprint champion – has already begun his outdoor season in style, clocking a superb 10.15 in the 100m in Tampa, USA, where he trains under Dennis Mitchell alongside Justin Gatlin, one of his key rivals at the Doha meeting starting on 15 May. Ogunode had already run faster at the recent Arab Championships in the Bahraini capital, Manama, clocking 10.04, but with a following wind above the legal limit at 4.1 m/s.
Ogunode is one of the most successful Qatari athletics stars in the history of the Doha meeting, and can be proud of his second place in the 200m in 2011 and third in 2014, when he equalled Mutaz’s record for the Doha meeting (third in 2011 and second in 2013).
The 800m will feature athletes such as Musaeb Abdulrahman Balla and Jamal Hairane. Balla, 26, feels a great deal of self-confidence ahead of a step up he has long awaited on the world stage, after an outstanding indoor season in 2015 in which he topped the world rankings with a superb win in Stockholm in 1:45.48, a new national record. Balla had already won the Arab Championships in Manama in April in a time of 1:46.74. Hairane, 21, an Asian Games bronze medallist in 2014, has chosen to begin his 2015 outdoor campaign with the 1500m. He had won silver at the Gulf Champions League and finished sixth at the Arab Championships. In Doha he will have the chance to test how far his level has progressed in the 800m against the best two-lap runners in the world, such as world champions Mohammed Aman and Asbel Kiprop. His focus will be on improving his personal best of 1:47.61.
Finally, athletics fans will get to enjoy Qatar’s rising wonder boy Abdalelah Haroun in his Diamond League debut, in a non-scoring 400m race added specifically for Asian athletes. Haroun – just 18 years old – had achieved sixth place among the world’s fastest indoors this year with 45.39, a new Asian senior record, and had already reached 44.68 twice outdoors, once at altitude in Sasolburg, South Africa, in March, and again at sea level in Manama at the end of April during the Arab Championships. That time was fast enough to win him gold in Manama, his first international title, while leaving him 0.20 seconds behind Saudi Arabia’s Hamdan Odah Al Bishi’s Asian junior record. This achievement currently puts Haroun third on the 2015 outdoor world list, an unbelievable feat for an athlete who was completely unknown until the end of last winter.
