By Shrivathsa Sridhar
(Reuters) – Armand Duplantis will be among the reigning Olympic champions adding star power to the world indoor championships this weekend when the Chinese city of Nanjing hosts the first major global athletics meet since last year’s Paris Games.
The three-day event was originally slated for 2020 and faced multiple postponements due to the COVID pandemic but Nanjing’s Sports Training Centre will finally welcome more than 570 athletes for start of the showpiece on Friday.
One of the main attractions will be pole vaulter ‘Mondo’ Duplantis, who soared 6.27 metres to break the world record for a staggering 11th time in Clermont-Ferrand last month.
“I’m super excited,” said the Swede, who impressed fans in China during the two Diamond League meets last year.
“It was my first time competing in China … and I jumped extremely well, broke the world record.”
Duplantis, who will be gunning for a third straight world indoor title, said that although he does not dwell on how much higher he can go, he would like to scale 6.30m in the near future.
“Indoors is a great opportunity always to break the world record, because we don’t have to deal with the wind and whatnot, so we have a lot more controlled variables in that sense,” the 25-year-old added.
Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen will be going for a 1,500m and 3,000m double on the track – a feat achieved only once at the indoor worlds by Ethiopian great Haile Gebrselassie in 1999.
The Olympic 5,000m champion, fresh off a similar double at the European indoors, said there will be little room for error.
“People are a little more stressed when it comes to indoors because the track is half the size with usually the same amount of competitors,” said 24-year-old.
“Many people feel like they have only half as much time to do the things they want to do. That’s the thing that I’m aware of in my approach to indoor races, is that I always try to do things with a little bit extra margin.
“If I pass or if I make a move, it has to be precise and it has to be executed perfectly.”
Olympic 110m hurdles champion Grant Holloway will target an unprecedented third straight world indoor title across 60m after crossing the line in 7.36 seconds at the U.S. trials last month to equal his own world lead.
Nanjing will crown a new world indoor champion with American Christian Coleman missing from the men’s 60m sprint, while Italian Zaynab Dosso heads the women’s field after her 7.01 second effort at the Europeans.
(Reporting by Shrivathsa Sridhar in Bengaluru; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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