Reigning World Champion Faith Cherotich will look to spoil Winfred Yavi’s party this weekend, when the two incredible steeplechasers collide at the Lausanne Diamond League on Friday, 21 August.
The women’s 3000m steeplechase event at the Pontaise Olympic Stadium in Switzerland has been earmarked as a fast one, with Kenyan-born Bahraini Yavi headlined to be gunning for the world-leading time of 8:51.06 held by Uganda’s Peruth Chemutai.In doing so, the 26-year-old aims to achieve one of the five or six fastest times in history.
In her quest, however, she will have to deal with Cherotich, who will look to build on her recent positive run of form, which has seen her emerge as a winner at both the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow late last month. Yavi, who is the reigning Olympic champion and winner of the Diamond League title in 2023, will, apart from the clock, also be chasing her first win in the series this season.
In her head-to-head meetings with Cherotich this season, Yavi in May finished a place higher than the former Olympic bronze medalist at the Xiamen meet, before trailing as runners-up in Eugene in early July.The duo will, however, not be the sole competitors in the race, with Tunisia’s Marwa Bouzayani also in the mix.Bouzayani, a fairly new name to many, made her mark when she claimed her first-ever Diamond League win with a meeting record of 8:59.28 in Stockholm in June.
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Meanwhile, in another event highlight in Lausanne, all of Grant Fisher, Addisu Yihune, Birhanu Balew and Parker Wolfe are poised to face off in the men’s 5000m.Yihune, Balew and Fisher are all in the top six of the men’s 5000m world rankings, while Wolfe is one of the discipline’s rising stars after he won the NCAA title in June.Bahrain’s Balew tops the Diamond League standings thanks to podium finishes in Monaco and Oslo, but is still chasing his first win of the season.
Yihune opened his Diamond League campaign strongly, the Ethiopian booking back-to-back world leads in Xiamen and Oslo. The USA’s Olympic bronze medallist Fisher claimed his first-ever Diamond League win in Paris in June, while his fellow American Wolfe made his Diamond League in Oslo the same month before winning a non-Diamond League two-mile race in Eugene. Lausanne will represent the 12th leg of the 2026 Wanda Diamond League, which began in Shanghai/Keqiao on 16 May, and ends at the two-day series final in Brussels on 4-5 September.