BRUSSELS — Jamaica’s double Olympic champion Elaine Thompson confirmed her sprint queen status with an emphatic 100 meters victory Friday at a season-ending Diamond League meeting packed with gold medal winners in Brussels.
Thompson led from the blocks and was never challenged as she set a Brussels meeting record of 10.72 seconds, just one-hundredth of a second outside her winning time in Rio.
It secured her the Diamond Race title in the 100m and with it a $40,000 prize. Diamond Race winners are determined by a points system from a series of 14 meetings held over the year.
Dutch 200m world champion Dafne Schippers, Thompson’s rival for most of the year, was second in 10.97, concluding a disappointing season after she came away from Rio with just a silver medal in the 200 meters.
In a thrilling night of track and field which featured a couple of botched world record attempts, the stand-out performance unexpectedly came from American pole vaulter Sandi Morris, who became only the second female in history to go over the 5m barrier outdoors after Russian Yelena Isinbayeva.
Although Morris’ compatriot Jennifer Suhr has vaulted 5.03m, that was indoors, and the current Olympic silver medalist set a packed King Baudouin stadium alight when she cleared 5.00m.
But she failed at three attempts at 5.07m, 1cm further than Isinbayeva’s world record.
Olympic 800 meters champion Caster Semenya set a personal best in winning the 400 meters in 50.40 seconds.
Ethiopian Almaz Ayana, who shattered the world record to win gold in the 10,000 meters in Rio, had her sights set on the eight-year-old mark in the shorter 5,000m in Brussels.
Yet she had to settle for victory in a meeting record of 14 minutes 18.89 seconds, more than seven seconds outside the world record.
Arguably the best contest of the evening was in the 3,000 meters steeplechase, where another record was attempted without success, but Kenya’s Conseslus Kipruto held off American Evan Jager, just as he did in Rio.
For the home crowd, Belgium’s Nafissatou Thiam followed up heptathlon gold in Rio with victory in the high jump.
Valerie Adams was trumped by American rival Michelle in the Diamond League final Thursday, but the Kiwi shot putter finished the season atop the discipline’s standings.
Olympic champion Carter threw a best of 19.98 meters in the competition which was held in Brussels’ central square (Grand Place).
Three-time world champion and twice Olympic gold medalist Adams finished second behind Carter with a best of 19.57m, but ended atop the Diamond Race, meaning she leaves $40,000 and a diamond for the better.
There was a further fillip for the Brussels audience with the belated award of gold medals to the Belgian women’s 4x100 meters relay team from the 2008 Olympics. The Belgians were promoted from silver after the doping disqualification of the Russian team that crossed the line in Beijing first. — Agencies
