EJ Obiena faces fellow Olympic bets in France tourney


At a glance

  • World record holder Armand “Mondo” Duplantis banners the elite cast that has 10 Olympic-bound athletes including Obiena in this tournament serving as a springboard for their final preparations for the Paris Games slated late this month.


A preview of the 2024 Paris Olympics hostilities is in store for pole vaulter EJ Obiena when he sees action in the Meeting de Paris Wanda Diamond League on Sunday, July 7, at the Estadio Charlety in France.

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EJ Obiena gears up for the 2024 Paris Olympics when he competes with fellow Olympians in the Meeting de Paris. (File Photo)

World record holder Armand “Mondo” Duplantis banners the elite cast that has 10 Olympic-bound athletes including Obiena in this tournament serving as a springboard for their final preparations for the Paris Games slated late this month.

Apart from Duplantis, Obiena will battle fellow Paris qualifiers Ben Broeders of Belgium, Thibaut Collet and Robin Emig of France, Emmanouil Karalis of Greece, Kurtis Marschall of Australia, and United States bets Sam Kendricks, Chris Nilsen and Jacob Wooten.

The presence of American KC Lightfoot and Polish Piotr Lisek could not also be discounted, as they both competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Lisek, in particular, boasts of three medals in the world championships.

The world No. 2 Obiena, who was the first Filipino to qualify for Paris, remains upbeat of his preparations for the Olympics as he tries to lean on his back-to-back golden feats in Poland last month.

He cleared a season-best 5.97 meters at the 6th Irena Szewinska Memorial in Bydgoszcz last June 20 and followed it up with a 5.87m feat at the Czeslaw Cybulski Memorial in Poznan three days later.

He also boasts of an Asian record of 6.00m he posted last year.

But this Parisian tournament is expected to challenge Obiena’s preparations especially with the presence of Duplantis, the reigning Olympic champion.

The Swedish superstar, a three-time Diamond League winner, has been registering 6-meter marks a couple of times this season, including in the Wanda Diamond LEague Xiamen in China last April where he reset his own world record to 6.24m.

World No. 3 Nilsen, who won silver in the 2020 Tokyo Games, is also another player fancied to finish at the podium after topping the US Olympic trials, as well as Kendricks, a two-time world champion and bronze winner of the 2016 Rio Games.