The hour of ‘redemption’ has arrived for Jasmine Camacho-Quinn. The Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo 2020 will play her second World Athletics Championships today, when she sees action starting at 12:40 p.m. (Puerto Rico time) as part of the fourth heat of the preliminary round of the 100 meter hurdles at the National Athletics Center Stadium, Budapest, Hungary.
This is the first step on Camacho-Quinn’s path to World Cup gold, which she lost in the 2022 edition held in Oregon. On that occasion, just one year after becoming Olympic champion, the Puerto Rican hurdler won the medal of bronze by losing in the final to the Nigerian Tobi Amusan and in second place against the Jamaican Brittany Anderson.
“I am excited and ready to run and represent Puerto Rico again,” Camacho-Quinn wrote yesterday in a post on her Instagram account, where she took the opportunity to announce that she was turning 27.
To secure her advancement to the semifinals, Camacho-Quinn – who is second in the world rankings, only behind Amusan – will have to finish in one of the top four positions in her heat. Four other runners will qualify for the semifinalist table if they obtain one of the four best times among those not directly classified.
The Puerto Rican will run in the ninth lane and should not face any problems in the test, as she arrives as the runner with the second best time this season with 12.31 seconds.
In that same ‘heat’ will be the Swedish Ditaji Kambundji, who is seeded with a time of 12.47 seconds made this season; as well as the Dutch Nadine Visser with 12.65 seconds; the French Laeticia Bapté with 12.69 seconds; and the Indian Jyothi Yarraji with 12.78 seconds. The Australian Celeste Mucci (12.84 seconds), the Togolese Noami Akakpo (13.81 seconds), the Polish Claudia Siciarz (12.96 seconds), and the Canadian Mariam Abdul-Rashid (12.82 seconds) will also compete in the same batch. Camacho-Quinn arrives at this event with a ten-win streak this season, including two Diamond League stops and the run that gave him the gold medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in San Salvador 2023, held until last 8 of July.
However, the bulk of the high-level competitors will begin to meet in the semifinal round. The American Nia Ali and Kendra Harrison should advance there, who have a record of 12.30 and 12.31 seconds this year, respectively. Ali’s 12.30 second mark is the best he has recorded this season. For her part, Amusan will arrive as the defending champion and will run in the fifth and final ‘heat’ for the fourth lane. Her participation comes after an appeals panel ruled last Thursday that the Nigerian hurdler had not violated anti-doping rules that require a suspension for missing tests. The decision came a month after the runner announced on social media that she had been accused of missing three tests in a span of 12 months.
The world champion of the 100 meter hurdles arrives with a mark of 12.34 seconds as her best performance this year. The semifinals of this test will be held on Wednesday and the final will be on Thursday.
Today’s session will also feature semi-distance runners Ryan Sánchez and John Rivera, both competing in the 800-meter sprint preliminaries. Sánchez will run in the ninth lane of the first heat at 1:20 pm (Puerto Rico time) and arrives at the event with his best time of the season of 1:45.91, while Rivera will be in the sixth lane of the third batch at 1:36 in the afternoon and is seeded with a mark of 1:45.29. The best three runners from each of the seven ‘heats’, plus the three best unclassified times advance to the semifinals.
Sánchez will meet in his round with the fifth best exponent of the 800 meters worldwide, the Kenyan Emmanuel Wanyonyi, who has recorded his personal best of 1:43.27 this year.