(Sports news) Olympic champion Elaine Thompson-Herah will be ready to start the year with a blazing run at the Muller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham. The fastest woman in the world had won the Wanda Diamond league in her previous competition which was in September last year. The Jamaican will be participating in the 60m race, she has a personal best of 6.98 secs which had come at Birmingham in 2017 and is also the 6th joint fastest timing in history.
The 29 year old will be looking to record the first sub 7 seconds of the season as Ewa Swoboda had run 7.00 secs a week ago in Poland which has been the fastest in 4 years. Murielle Ahoure was the last female sprinter to run under 7 seconds, she ran a 6.97 secs in 2018 at Birmingham. Thompson had also won the gold in 2019 at Birmingham when she clocked 7.13 and was beaten by Mujinga Kambundji 4 years ago as she will be a close competitor this time.
Another Olympic champion, Armand Duplantis will also be competing at the Muller Indoor Grand Prix. He has set the Pole vault world record at Glasgow in 2020 and will definitely try to get past the 6.18m mark. Duplantis already has three 6m plus jumps this year and all of them have come in the past 4 weeks. Christopher Nilsen has been the only other athlete who has cleared 6m and above this season but would not be competing at Birmingham. Thiago Braz would be a close competitor who cleared 5.81m at France yesterday, the Brazilian had won the gold in the 2016 Rio Olympics with a personal best of 6.03m and hasn’t come anywhere near of it since then.
Noah Lyles will be running for the first time at the Birmingham tracks, Lyles has been focusing on the 60m this season so far and has improved his timings in the last few events. The 200m specialist has been improving his timing every race and ran a personal best of 6.56 secs at New York in the first week of February but it will be tough to go for the gold as Ronnie Baker will be running alongside him and the third fastest athlete in this event will be the favourite.
Baker ran a 6.40 secs in 2018 just 6 hundredth of a second behind Christian Coleman who set the current world record at that race. The 28 year old has beaten Lyles both the times the pair has faced indoors, he beat Lyles at the Millrose games which was held at the end of January.
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