T&T's quest for a first medal in the IAAF World Athletics Championships, Eugene's Hayward Field in the USA, will continue on Saturday with Tyra Gittens and the 4x400m relay team of Dwight St Hillaire, Jereem Richards, Asa Guevara, Shakeem McKay, Kashief King and Jerod Elcock.
Gittens will compete in the women's long jump from 3 pm (TT time) while the 4x400 men's real will commence with heats from 8.40 pm.
Last month the 24-year-old Olympian Gittens who now competes for the University of Texas won a second straight national women's long jump title with a 6.27 metres leap
For this year's women's long jump event, Germany's Malaika Mihambo is the woman with the gold-plated credentials, having brought her major championship Midas touch to bear at the last World Championships final in Doha three years ago and for last year’s Olympic Games – and at the 2018 European Championships for that matter.
The 28-year-old German also stood at the top of the 2022 world outdoor list until the weekend before the World Athletics Championships Oregon22. No one had been able to match the 7.09m Mihambo leapt at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Birmingham back on 21 May – until Australia’s Brooke Buschkuehl (nee Stratton) jumped 7.13m (1.8m/s) at the MVA meet in Chula Vista in California on 9 July.
Six other women have bettered that mark, though Tara Davis (who beat Buschkuehl with a windy 7.24m at Chula Vista and notched a legal 7.03m) and Monae’ Nichols (6.97m) won’t be among Mihambo’s rivals in Oregon, having finished outside the top three at the US Championships.
The other four are Sweden’s European indoor bronze medallist Khaddi Sagnia, who jumped a lifetime best of 6.95m to secure her first Wanda Diamond League victory at Hayward Field on 28 May, Olympic bronze medallist Ese Brume of Nigeria (6.92m), Ghana’s Deborah Acquah (6.89m) and Bekh-Romanchuk (6.86m).
Britain’s Lorraine Ugen was the big winner in the eve-of-Eugene test in the Swedish capital, the two-time world indoor bronze medallist pulling out a fifth-round season’s best of 6.81m to trump Bekh-Romanchuk (6.76m) and Sagnia (6.74m).
In 2017, T&T famously beat the USA in the 4-x400m event and will look to world indoor 400m champion Richards for a repeat.
And today, it will mark the last chance for the local men to pick up a medal after Richards could only muster a sixth-placed finish in the men's 200 metres final on Thursday night.
<Jereem Richards 6th in 200m final>
On Thursday night, running out of lane two, Richards crossed the finish line in 20.08 seconds, well behind gold medal winner, Noah Lyles of the USA who won a new American record time of 19.31 seconds, to beat countrymen Kenneth Bednarek (19.77), and Erriyon Knighton (19.80) into second and third respectively.
Lyles' new national record just edged out Michael Johnson's 19.32 set in 1996, but still trails Jamaican Usain Bolt (19.19 and his countryman Yohan Blake (19.26) as the fastest time ever in the event.
In today's 4x400 relay, the USA will start as favourites having won seven of the past eight world titles and eight of the past 10 Olympic gold medals in this discipline.
But however great their depth appears on paper, sometimes when it comes to the 4x400m relay the contest is a lot closer than expected.
Take the Olympic final last year, for example. The US quartet featured four men who are capable of running close to – or even below – 44 seconds flat for 400m. And they duly won in 2:55.70. But the Netherlands – whose national record is slower than the slowest PB of the US 4x400m team and with just one man on the team that had broken 45.5 seconds that year – finished second in 2:57.18. That translates to roughly a third of a second difference per runner.
Whether the Netherlands will be able to reproduce that kind of magic in Oregon – on the USA’s home turf – is another matter entirely. Indeed, make no mistake that the USA will be heavily favoured to win this title yet again.
Olympic bronze medallists Botswana and fourth-place finishers Belgium also finished inside 2:58 in Tokyo, and they’ll likely feature prominently in the final in Oregon.
Jamaica has the talent and depth to replicate their silver medal from Doha three years ago while T&T, who famously beat the USA in this event at the 2017 World Championships, will also be in the medal hunt, led by world indoor 400m champion Richards.
Provided their leading men aren’t too tired from the mixed relay and the individual 400m, the Dominican Republic could also be a factor in the men’s 4x400m.
World 400m record-holder Wayde van Niekerk, meanwhile, has been named in the South African 4x400m team and they’ll have hopes of reaching the final in Oregon.
