by Stuart Weir
Danielle Williams wins in Xiamen.
It is only April, but Danielle Williams already has a Grand Slam win and a Diamond League win in her name. The track at the Xiamen Diamond League has 10 lanes, and each one was filled. Ten athletes, six of whom had run under 12.40 – although not in April- were in the field. Williams got a decent start but a brilliant finish to win in 12.53 from Grace Stark (12.58).
Her comments after the race were: “When I came out here, the focus was on the last half of the race, trying to finish strong. I think I did that, so I am satisfied. We are pretty much past jet lag. We have been here for a while now. I feel like I am Chinese now. Monday, it is back to training, and then Shanghai next weekend. Yes, it is early, in April, and the season ends in September, so we are not even halfway into the training cycle. It is a good sign to be running well early in the season. I have tweaked a lot. The game has changed. Everyone is running fast, so I have to tweak to get up there. I tweaked the start and tweaked the finish”. It seemed to work, Danielle.
I was interested in Danielle’s comments about how the event has changed. I talked to her about that last year, and she said, “There are a lot of fast hurdlers now compared to a couple of years ago. But the 100m hurdles have always been more about speed than technique. Because the hurdles are so low, it’s always about how fast you can run. ‘Run’ is wrong because you don’t usually run between hurdles. Still, whoever can move the fastest in between, and the faster you are on the flat, you can escape not being as good as a technical hurdler, because it’s really not about technical, but about how quickly you can get back to the track and run. And I feel like there are a lot of hurdlers these days who can run a fast 100-metre run. And that’s why you’ve seen the times have gotten so much faster”.
Danielle won the short hurdles in the Grand Slam in Kingston, Jamaica, earlier this year. She was not one of the contracted racers, but she ran as a challenger and won the competition, which involved combined performance on 100 flat and 100 hurdles. He was pleased to have an opportunity to run in her native Jamaica – she is based in the USA – and even more delighted to win! She was very positive about the experience: “It was pretty fun. Pretty exciting. It is something new, something that I haven’t done before. And so I was kind of like, I didn’t know what to expect going into it, but I think it was a fascinating, exciting concept. And outside of that, they really took care of us athletes. They ensured everything was well thought out and planned for us, which I appreciated”.
Danielle always seemed to me an underrated athlete. Keni Harrison and Tobi Amusen have set new world records, but neither has dominated the event in terms of winning global medals. Danielle was the world champion in 2015 and 2023 and took a bronze medal in 2019. From how she has started 2025, don’t be surprised to see her in the medals in Tokyo in September.
