2022 ‘Worlds’ will miss some top stars

Quite rightly, fans will focus on the athletes who will congregate in Eugene for the World Championships for the next 10 days. However, there are some key players who will only be able to watch from a distance. This group includes two women who might otherwise be on the verge of something great.

Mariya Lasitskene is the finest high jumper of this generation. She won the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo, Japan, last year and was poised to win her record fourth World Championships title in Eugene, until her country, Russia, invaded Ukraine. World Athletics, the governing body for track and field around the globe, has closed ranks with the international community by banning Russians from Eugene. Lasitskene, reigning women’s pole vault champion Anzhelika Sidorova and 2015 110 metres hurdles winner Sergey Shubenkov may or may not agree with the Russian offensive, but all three will suffer.

Injury has eliminated three other great ones. Two-time defending men’s pole vault champion Sam Kendricks missed the Tokyo Games, thanks to COVID-19, and now a knee injury crosses his name off the list of entrants for Eugene. This charming American even has fans here. Despite our disaffection for the vault, Kendricks’ skill and easy-going demeanour delighted Jamaicans when he cleared 5.80 metres here in 2017.

Only one male vaulter has more World Championship gold medals and it’s Ukrainian great Sergey Bubka.

Poland’s three-time Olympic and four-time World champion Anita Wlodarczyk will watch the hammer throw from afar. Like Kendricks, she is injured, but her story is bizarre. She witnessed a car theft in progress, set off in pursuit of the robber and ... pulled a leg muscle.

Wlodarczyk has had her fair share of bad luck. At the same 2009 World Championships where the incomparable Usain Bolt set world records in both the 100m and 200m, she unleashed a record of her own. Elated, she jumped for joy, but on one landing twisted her ankle. The diagnosis was a severe damage to structural tissues requiring surgery.

Her world record is 82.98 metres. In addition, she has 17 of the 20 longest throws in history.

Speedy Steven Gardiner has helped to make The Bahamas the quarter-mile capital of the world with big wins at the 2019 World Championships and last year’s Olympics. Sadly, an inflamed tendon forced Gardiner to withdraw from the Eugene meet at the last minute.

Two 400m hurdlers, Norway’s Karsten Warholm and American Dalilah Muhammad, are racing against time to be ready when their events start on July 16 and July 19, respectively. If they missed Eugene, it would hurt. After all, the Norwegian battered the world record down to a mind-boggling 45.94 seconds in Tokyo, while Muhammad scurried to the second-fastest women’s time ever – 51.58 – behind a world record by her teammate, Sydney McLaughlin. Hopefully, they will both be ready to speed at the Worlds.

There is much to watch and admire in Eugene, but the absence of Lasitskene, Sidorova, Kendricks, Wlodarczyk and Gardiner really hurts.