Jamaica’s Akeem Blake won his first Diamond League meet with a 9.93secs performance in Brussels (13). Like the other winners, he was rewarded US$30,000 and an automatic spot to the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo, Japan.
Blake shocked fans and other competitors in the lineup when he jumped from the blocks and sped away from the American favorites Fred Kerley, Paris Olympic bronze medalist, and former World Champion Christian Coleman. He was the only one in the lineup to register under 10 seconds.
Letsile Tebogo, the Paris Olympic 200m champion of Botswana lost to USA’s Paris silver medalist Kenneth Bednarek. While Bednarek’s defeat of Tebogo might come as a surprise, the writing about Bednarek’s potential had been on the wall since the US championships in June, when he barely lost to Noah Lyles and then finished ahead of him in Paris.
In Brussels, Bednarek came off the turn ahead of Tebogo and maintained his form in the straight where Tebogo had no response, trailing in at 19.80secs to Bednarek’s 19.67.
The jumps also shared the unforgettable Wanda moments. Ukraine’s Mahuchikh cleared 2.10m at the first attempt and broke Bulgaria’s Stefka Kostadinova’s 37-year women’s high jump world record of 2.09 metres. And Jamaica’s Tajay Gayle found his way back to the podium in the long jump with an 8.28-meter win over a strong field that included World and Olympic champion and world leader Miltiadis Tentoglou (third). The 28-yr-old has been battling injuries since winning the 2019 World Championships with a massive 8.69 meters, at times struggling to make the Jamaica team.