CIARA MAGEEAN PRODUCED a resilient final surge to reel in Sarah Healy in the home straight and deliver a brilliant Irish 1-2 in the 1500m at Tuesday’s Golden Spike meet in Ostrava.
Mageean was in sixth place as Healy moved to take up the running off the final bend and kicked for home, but it was Portaferry’s Mageean who had a fraction more left in the tank to clock 4:01.98 in her opening 1500m run of the season.
Healy ran a season’s best in second, the Dubliner finishing just 0.14 seconds behind Mageean in 4:02.12.
Sophie Becker ran 51.82 in the women’s 400m which was dominated by Poland’s Natalia Kaczmarek (50.09), while Luke McCann ran a personal best of 3:34.32 in the men’s 1500m, moving up to fifth in the Irish all-time list.
Elsewhere, reigning Olympic and world champion Armand Duplantis cleared six metres and narrowly missed a world record attempt in the pole vault.
The 24-year-old Swede set a world record at 6.24m in April and got close to beating 6.25m at the eastern Czech city but brushed the bar with his belly on the third attempt.
Canada’s Andre De Grasse won his two races on the wet Ostrava track, clocking 10.10 seconds for a season best on 100 metres and 20.09 seconds in his first appearance on 200 metres this year.
De Grasse beat Ryiem Forde of Jamaica as well as Olympic champion and his training partner Marcell Jacobs on the 100-metre track.Reigning Olympic champion Steven Gardiner of the Bahamas won the 400 metres in a season best of 44.39.
Algerian Djamel Sedjati, second at the 2022 world championships, won the 800 metres in a world-leading time of 1:43.51.
Reigning world champion Haruka Kitaguchi of Japan won the women’s javelin with a throw of 60.47m, and Great Britain’s Molly Caudery won the women’s pole vault with 4.84 metres.
Earlier on Tuesday, Athletics Ireland announced their initial squad selection for the European Championships which begin in Rome on 7 June.
– Additional reporting © AFP 2024
