Silesia delivers quality
The Kamila Skolimowska Memorial Stadium, host of the Silesia Diamond League, is one of the best on the Diamond League circuit – all the more so when full of Polish track and field fans. The negative is that Chorzów is not the easiest city to get to. Poles love their athletics and create a raucous atmosphere when one of their favorites is in action.
The first thing that strikes one about the event is the quality of competition in some events.
Take the men’s 100m won by Oblique Seville. There were 18 athletes in two semi-finals, with 5 going sub-10 – just to make the final! All nine finalists went sub-10, with Seville clocking 9.83. Seville clearly does not do false modesty, commenting afterward: “I am in pretty good shape and I feel pretty good about the win. I am in great shape for the Ultimate Championships. For the rest of the season I would like to keep winning, and the next win should be in Brussels”.
Another high-quality event was the women’s long jump, with Jazmin Sawyers’ 6.94 only enough for 4th place, as Alyssa Jones and Agate de Sousa each jumped 6.98. It is all new to Jones, who commented: “I graduated from Stanford this year, so it has been a very long season for me, with the collegiate competition indoors and out. I have basically been competing for the last 9 months”.
Alison dos Santos needed a 46.43 to hold off Karsten Warholm in the 400m hurdles. The winner said: “The line-up was amazing – everybody was here. I knew that to win here I had to give my best. The vibes here are amazing”.
Herculis EBS
July 21, 2023, Monaco, photo by Kevin Morris
Karsten Warholm, always a gracious loser, commented: “You cannot be mad if you set a SB. Of course I always want to win. But 46.5 is really good coming out of the European Championships, which really took its toll. The other guys hadn’t been racing for a month, so they were fresher. But I pulled myself together, and I am satisfied with the performance.”
In the end, Mondo Duplantis won the pole vault with 6.20, with two others clearing six meters (and three at 5.90), but it was not a classic Duplantis show with three failures before he cleared 6.10. His honest assessment was: “The competition was super difficult for me. I was really sloppy at the beginning. But I was trying to survive, to give myself a new life. I always tell myself every time you clear a height, you get three new attempts. I made a few mistakes today, and some of my judgment calls were off. But if you had told me that at 5.90 I would end the competition at 6.20, I would have been really happy. I lost too much energy at those lower heights to break the world record today.”
Mykolas Alekna (Lithuania) won the discus from Ceh and Stahl with a Diamond League record of 72.58.
All that was missing was a Polish win.
