Qatar's Barshim comes third in IAAF Diamond League

As expected ,Bondarenko won the High Jump and subsequently the Diamond Race thanks to being flawless up to and including 2.33m, making that height with a soaring clearance. Although Greece’s Konstantinos Baniotis and Mutaz Essa Barshim also cleared 2.33m at the first time of asking, they then brought the bar down three times at 2.35m, a height which Bondarenko passed, and they finished second and third respectively based on their earlier failures in the competition. Bondarenko then audaciously requested for the bar to be put up to the World record height of 2.46m and asked for silence from an attentive Zurich crowd for his 11th attempt in the last two months at trying to consign to history Javier Sotomayor’s two-decade-old standard of 2.45m.  However, after one modest attempt – compared to his two good efforts after he had secured his gold medal in Moscow – he decided to call it a night after just three jumps in total to the slight disappointment of the rapt crowd. Silas Kiplagat, third going into the final bend, came out of a tightly bunched leading pack coming into the last 100m to take the men’s 1500m in 3:30.97, just edging out Djibouti’s Ayanleh Souleiman who finished second in 3:31.64 but who had already secured first place in the Diamond Race. Meseret Defar’s outstanding 5000m win over her compatriot Tirunesh Dibaba and Bohdan Bondarenko bringing the Letzigrund Stadium to a standstill as he attempted again to improve the High Jump World record provided the highlights of the first of this season’s IAAF Diamond League finals on Thursday, Aug.29. The pair were run close by the 1500m win by Kenya’s Silas Kiplagat and Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s sizzling 200m win.  In total, there were 15 Diamond Race trophies awarded along with the US$40,000 first prize that accompanies them The second of the 2013 Diamond League finals will be held in Brussels on 6 September. Defar and Dibaba, the 5000m and 10,000m gold medallists respectively from the 2013 IAAF World Championships, were brought together to battle for supremacy over the shorter distance, something that didn’t happen in Moscow earlier this month owing to both of them deciding to only have one bite of the cherry in the Russian capital. It was just their fourth race against each other since the Beijing Olympics five years ago. Source: Qatar Olympic Committee