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Mondo Duplantis
Swede, Mondo Duplantis, broke the meet record at home during the Wanda Stockholm Diamond League meet on Sunday.
Three days after improving the Bislett Games pole vault record to 6.01m and attempting a world record in Oslo, Duplantis repeated that performance in front of the home Bauhaus-Galan crowd.
He cleared 6.02m on his first attempt before he went on to again try 6.19m three times.
As in Oslo, he was not able to get to that centimetre and the current world record of 6.18m that he set indoors in Glasgow in Feb. 2020.
“Today was special,” said Duplantis, whose next competition will be the Olympic Games in Tokyo. “I hadn’t felt that kind of pressure on me in quite a long time. I haven’t been able to really jump in front of a full Swedish crowd since I became the world record-holder so having my family here, the whole home crowd rooting for me – I can’t lose in front of them, so that’s another level of it.
“I wish I could have given the world record a couple more better attempts but I felt really good jumping today.”
Women’s 800m
There was no fooling around in the women’s 800m. Seven of the eight finishers clocked sub-two-minutes and two run 1:56.
The race was won by Cuban Rose Mary Almanza in the time of 1:56.28, which is a meet record and new personal best. Right with her was Jamaican Natoya Goule clocking a 1:56.44 finish time – a season’s best.
American Kate Grace took third in a new personal best time of 1:57.36.
The 29-year-old Almanza is a 10-time national champion in the 4 x 400m, 800m, and 1500m distances.
Grace finished eighth in the final at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games in the time of 1:59.57. Grace apparently timed her peak early as she finished seventh in the US Olympic Trials in the time of 1:59.17. She went on to win the Oslo Diamond League meet with a with a personal best of 1:57.60. It was her first Diamond League win.
Grace even beat Tokyo Olympic hopeful Keely Hodgkinson of Great Britain, who finished fourth. Nineteen-year-old Hodgkinson beat Laura Muir and Jemma Reekie on June 27 with a blistering 57-second second lap to win in 1:59.61.
The temperatures were 🔥 and so were the athletes at yesterday's #StockholmDL 🇸🇪
— Wanda Diamond League (@Diamond_League) July 5, 2021
In case you missed it, or if like us, you just want to watch it again and again, you can check out all the highlights here 👇
Men’s 800m
Ferguson Rotich won the men’s 800m in the time of 1:43.84. It was a season’s best for the Kenyan. He was a fifth place finisher in the final of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Rotich owns a best of 1:42.54. By the effort that he displayed, he could have met his personal best if he had to.
Not far behind was Canadian Marco Arop with a new lifetime best of 1:44.00. In third was Brit Giles Elliot also picking up a new personal best with his 1:44.05 performance. The 27-year-old is a four-time national champion and a European Championships bronze medallist from 2016.
For Arop, his previous best was 1:44.14 from the Monaco Diamond League meet last year. It was a big day for Arop who not ran his best race to date, but he was also named to the Canadian team going to Tokyo on Sunday.