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Current world champion, Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands, and silver medallist Marie-Jose Ta Lou of Cote Divoire are among the top athletes going after Shaunae Miller-Uibo as she defend her International Association of Athletics Federations Diamond League 200m title in Shanghai.
The 24-year-old Bahamian, who also won the Diamond League trophy for 400m - the distance at which she earned gold at Rio 2016 - finished one place behind Ta Lou in the London Olympic stadium last Summer before winning the Commonwealth 200m title in a Games record of 22.09sec.
Schippers, of The Netherlands, got her Diamond League season underway on May 4 at the Doha meeting, where despite clocking 11.03 in the 100m she could only finish sixth in a race won by Ta Lou, of the Ivory Coast, in 10.85.
Miller-Uibo is one of 20 reigning world or Olympic champions taking part in the second leg of this season’s 14-event series, which will climax with winner-takes-all finals in Zurich - where Miller-Uibo set a national record of 21.88 in winning last year - and Brussels, for which the preceding meetings will serve as qualifiers.
Meanwhile the men’s 110m hurdles - always of special interest in Shanghai given the warmly remembered exploits of China’s former world and Olympic champion and world record holder Liu Xiang - offers a field of Olympic quality.
Jamaica’s world and Olympic champion Omar McLeod will seek a hat-trick of wins in the Shanghai Stadium, but the Diamond League title is not his to defend.
That honour belongs to the Russian athlete Sergey Shubenkov, world silver medallist, and competing in China as an Authorised Neutral Athlete against the background of Russia’s continuing suspension from international athletics on doping grounds.
The same may not be true for the men’s 100m that concludes the evening’s action, which features home sprinters Zhenye Xie, who has a best of 10.04, and Bingtian Su, 9.99 runner and World Indoor 60m silver medallist in Birmingham earlier this year in a race where Xie was fourth.
How will the man who beat Usain Bolt to what promised to be his final world title, 36-year-old Justin Gatlin, look in his first big meeting of the season against a field that includes the Canadian Olympic 200m silver medallist Andre De Grasse, making his way back to fitness after the hamstring strain that put him out of last year’s World Championships at the last minute?
Also in the hunt will be Britain’s 2017 Diamond League champion and 4x100m relay world champioin CJ Ujah and Turkey’s world 200m gold medallist Ramil Guliyev.
