He arrives in Nagoya after clocking 9.99 seconds within the Czech Republic final month
Thailand’s Puripol Boonson celebrates after successful the lads’s 200m last. Picture: REUTERS
NAGOYA:
Thailand’s Puripol Boonson will look to show himself as Asia’s pre-eminent sprinter when he bids for the 100 metres gold medal on the Aichi-Nagoya Video games, three years after taking silver at Hangzhou.
Boonson turned Southeast Asia’s first runner to interrupt the 10-second barrier when he ran 9.94 on residence soil in December and enters the Japan meet in respectable kind after posting 9.99 seconds at a race within the Czech Republic final month.
He made a splash at Hangzhou as a 17-year-old runner-up behind Xie Zhenyi, and the veteran Chinese language sprinter might once more be Puripol’s largest risk on the Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium this week.
Boonson is a hero in his residence nation after successful the 100-200m double on the 2025 Southeast Asian Video games, and an Asian Video games gold would ship Thai athletics followers right into a frenzy.
House followers will probably be centered on Olympic javelin champion Haruka Kitaguchi and her rivalry with China’s 18-year-old sensation Yan Ziyi.
Kitaguchi turned the primary Japanese lady to win an Olympic discipline occasion on the Paris Video games however Yan has taken the athletics world by storm this yr.
She produced the second-longest throw in historical past (71.74) on residence soil in Xiamen in Could on the day after her 18th birthday, one in every of 5 Diamond League titles for the yr.
Czech Barbora Spotakova’s world file of 72.28 could also be at Yan’s mercy.
Within the males’s excessive bounce, Bahrain’s former Olympic champion Mutaz Barshim will defend his title and bid for a fourth Asian Video games gold, having additionally received at Hangzhou, Incheon 2014 and Guangzhou in 2010.
Barshim’s compatriot Winfred Yavi, Olympic champion within the girls’s 3,000m steeplechase, will intention for a 3rd consecutive Asian Video games gold within the occasion.
The Kenya-born Yavi will even tackle the ladies’s 5000m and 10,000m, concentrating on a center distance hat-trick.
China’s Feng Bin, the Olympic runner-up at Paris, heads into the ladies’s discus as favorite after claiming her first Diamond League title in Brussels this month with a throw of 67.46m.