ATHLETICS – Bahrain’s superstar sprinter and former world champion Salwa Eid Naser is set to race in four major competitions this month as part of her ‘Road to Tokyo’ leading up to the World Athletics Championships 2025.
The highly anticipated worlds will be held next month in the close-to-70,000-capacity Japan National Stadium in the Japanese capital, with Naser set to be a key member of Bahrain’s national team.
More than 2,000 of the best track and field elite athletes representing around 200 nations are set to compete for medals across 49 events during the nine days of action from September 13 to 21.
Having won the silver medal at last year’s Paris 2024 Olympics, Naser will be one of the favourites to climb onto the podium for the women’s 400 metres in Tokyo. But prior to her medal bid, the event’s 2019 world champion will first be hitting the track in a series of top meetings across Europe over the next few weeks.
The talented 27-year-old will first be racing at the Mityng Ambasadorow Bialostockiego i Podlaskiego Sportu in Krakow, Poland, this Saturday. She will be running in the women’s 300 metres – a distance that is rarely contested in official competitions.
Naser will be going up against a top-quality field that includes Polish favourite Natalia Kaczmarek, who joined Naser on the podium at last year’s Olympic Games as the women’s 400m bronze-medallist.
Naser will be racing in the 300m for only the second time in her career. The other occasion was in a meet in Bahrain in 2018, when she clocked a mark of 37.92 seconds.
Following her participation in Krakow, Naser will get back to competing in the 400m and will remain in Poland for the first of three competitions in this year’s Wanda Diamond League – the premier one-day meeting series held annually under World Athletics, the sport’s international governing body.
Naser will first be racing in the Silesia Kamila Skolimowska Memorial in the city of Chorzow on August 16, and then compete on August 20 in the Athletissima Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Naser will then run in the Weltklasse Zurich meeting, also in Switzerland, which marks the two-day finals of this year’s Wanda Diamond League. There, qualified athletes will vie for Diamond Trophies as the yearly champions of their respective events.
Naser is a two-time winner of the Diamond Trophy, having clinched the honour in both the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
She is currently in prime position to qualify for Zurich being placed fifth on the event’s Wanda Diamond League standings with 15 points. Ahead of her are Leike Klaver of the Netherlands with 21 points, Isabella Whittaker of the US with 19 points, reigning world and Olympic champion Marileidy Paulino of the Dominican Republic with 16 points, and Amber Anning of the UK, also with 16 points.
Naser heads into these final four meetings prior to the worlds with a season’s best time in the 400m of 48.67s, which she clocked in April in a race in Kingston, Jamaica. She has since been busy with various participations in meets worldwide, including two lower-tier events last month in Belgium.
patrick@gdnmedia.bh
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