Chopra, Sable spearhead Indian challenge in Diamond League season finale

PTI, Sep 12, 2024, 1:53 PM IST

Javelin throw star Neeraj Chopra will have lofty expectations to live up to, while for steeplechaser Avinash Sable, it would be an opportunity to make up for a disappointing Olympics, when the the star-studded Diamond League season finale begins here on Friday, featuring the best of world athletics.

The showpiece is spread over two days for the first time and the field features top athletes from all continents, including an unprecedented number of Olympic medal winners, who will be vying for the top honours in 32 disciplines.

Pole vault world record holder Armand DuPlantis, American sprint queen Sha’Carri Richardson, and superstar hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone are among the big names who will light up the King Baudouin Stadium here.

National record-holding 3000m steeplechaser Sable, after finishing 11th in the Olympic Games, will be in action on Friday in his maiden appearance in the DL season finale.

Chopra, who added a silver to his Olympic medal tally in Paris following a historic gold in the Tokyo Games, will be aiming to end his season on a high on Saturday.

It is for the first time that a DL finale features two Indians.

Sable finished 14th in the overall Diamond League standings with three points from two meetings. But 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 sneak inside the top 12 cut-off.

Five meetings out of the 14 in the DL series across the world this season had men’s 3000m steeplechase event.

The 29-year-old Sable had finished sixth with a national record time of 8:09.91 — bettering his own earlier mark — in the Paris leg of the Diamond League on July 7. He was 14th at the Silesia leg with a time of 8:29.96 on August 25.

Chopra, on the other hand, made the DL final cut after finishing fourth in the overall standings with 14 points from his two second-place finishes in the one-day meets held in Doha and Lausanne.

Each Diamond League season finale champion is awarded a ‘Diamond Trophy’, USD 30,000 prize money and a wild card for the World Athletics Championships. The runner-up gets USD 12,000.

Chopra skipped the last series meet in Zurich last week.

The 26-year-old finished two points behind Czechia’s Jakub Vadlech. Grenada’s Anderson Peters and German star Julian Weber took the top two spots with 29 and 21 points respectively.

Chopra has been struggling with his fitness this season and is expected to meet a doctor to rectify a groin injury that has affected him all season and came in the way of his quest to hit the 90m mark.

He had won the Lausanne leg in 2022 and 2023 and finished second behind Vadlejch in the winner-takes-all finale in Eugene, USA, last year.