Ryan Crouser, Sam Kendricks, and Laura Muir will bring a strong momentum to Silesia’s Kamila Skolimowska Memorial in Chorzow, Poland, on Sunday, September 6, 2020, the next stop on the World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting series.
Crouser, the 206 Olympic shot put champions, has been on a tear, this season, improving his personal best to 22.91m and throwing 22.72m in Des Moines last Saturday, in a competition where he threw beyond the 22-metre line on each of his six attempts. His appearance in the freshly renamed National Athletics Stadium will be his first outside the United States this year.
The 27-year-old has been a class apart this year, but organisers have assembled much of the best of the rest to take him on. He’ll be butting heads with rising Italian star Leonardo Fabbri, who improved to 21.99m last weekend to take the national title, and Polish star Michal Haratyk, the European champion. Haratyk has shown fine form this season, with a best of 21.88m set at this stadium on August 25. Nick Ponzio, fourth on this season’s world list at 21.72m, is also on the slate, along with two-time world champion David Storl of Germany.
Kendricks, the two-time world pole vault champion, returns to the stadium just days after a 6.02m leap in Lausanne, the second-highest of his storied career. That improved on his 5.82m season’s best set at the Janusz Kusocinski Memorial in the same Silesia Stadium on 25 August.
The Polish presence will be strong, too, with triple World Championships medallist Piotr Lisek, who has scaled 5.90m this season, and 2011 world champion Pawel Wojciechowski also jumping. Lisek has been nursing an injury that forced him to the sidelines in Lausanne.
Meanwhile, European 1500m champion Muir returns to action after an impressive 3:57.86 victory in Stockholm where she dominated a solid field, and a 2:00.16 800m victory in Marseille on Thursday night.
She’ll face Polish star Sofia Ennaoui, who finished second to Muir over the distance at the most recent editions of the European indoor and outdoor championships.
Ethiopians Lemlem Hailu, the world U20 indoor record-holder at 4:01.57 and 800m national record-holder Habitam Alemu are also in the field.
