Will history repeat itself in Eugene?

The last two times triple jumper supreme Yuilmar Rojas lost, she lost to Shanieka Ricketts of Jamaica. Ricketts’ compatriot Danielle Williams won her first major 100-metre hurdles race of the season in Budapest in the final of the World Championships. Now, just like another Jamaican world champion, she just can’t stop winning.

If Ricketts and Williams win this weekend in Eugene, Oregon at the Diamond League final, it would be a double case of history on rewind.

Ricketts got a ‘victory’ over the lanky Venezuelan in the 2021 Monaco Diamond League meet. Rojas jumped 15.12 metres to advance to the last round where the slate was wiped clean, only to lose to the tall Jamaican who spanned 14.75m in the crucial last stanza.

Under today’s Diamond League rules, Rojas would have won, as efforts in the first five rounds are now tallied.

Ricketts won fair and square at the 2019 Diamond League final, 14.93m to 14.74m for the Venezuelan.

In Budapest, Rojas summoned a last-ditch effort, measured at 15.08m, to salvage her fourth World Championship in a row. That knocked Ricketts down from third to fourth and ended her quest for a third successive medal.

The St Thomas native had won the silver medal behind Rojas in 2019 and 2022.

Williams has been riding a wave since her upset triumph in Budapest. Largely winless in 2023 until she got to the Hungarian capital, the 30-year-old has won in Zurich and Berlin since that triumph. If she succeeds in Eugene, she will be retracing the steps of Jamaica’s first World 100m hurdles champion, Brigitte Foster-Hylton. Foster-Hylton went to Berlin for the 2009 World Championships without a win to her name. She fired home to gold and then went undefeated for the rest of the year.

Ricketts and Williams will hope that history will repeat itself this weekend. In Ricketts’ case, Rojas’ wobbly form and her own rise to 15m status opens the door. Rojas, Ricketts and Ukrainian Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk are the only jumpers to cross that formidable barrier this year, and the Jamaican did it - 15.01m - on September 8 in Brussels.

Rojas did the biggest jump of the year at 15.15m on August 31 in Zurich.

They both compete on today’s day one of the Diamond League final, and Williams will have her hands full. The women who finished right behind her in Budapest, Puerto Rico’s Olympic champion Jasmine Camacho Quinn, and world leader Kendra Harrison of the USA, have faster 2023 times, 12.30 and 12.24 seconds respectively.

Famously, Williams blitzed the Budapest final in 12.43 to capture her second world title. Up to that point, her only 2023 victory occurred in Marietta, Georgia on June 17, where she managed a time of 12.62 into a headwind measured at 1.5 metres per second.