Rhasidat Adeleke has delayed her first appearance on the Diamond League circuit this summer and is now unlikely to race in Europe until July.
Adeleke was on the original start list for a high-quality 400 metres at the Shanghai Diamond League meeting this Saturday, the first stop on the 2026 circuit after the Doha meeting was postponed. But the Dublin sprinter was absent when the final line-ups were published on Tuesday.
The 23-year-old has dipped her toes into a couple of races at her training base in Texas, running a 200m on May 1st in 22.86 seconds, also running a 4x400m relay leg in Texas last month. It’s now unclear when exactly she will race her first individual 400m this summer, and is not expected to compete in Europe until after the Eugene Diamond League, in the US, on July 4th.
Shanghai has drawn some of the best women’s 400m runners around, including Olympic silver medallist Salwa Eid Naser from Bahrain. Entries have also been announced for women’s 400m at the Rome Diamond League on June 4th, with Britain’s Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson among the starters there.
RM Block
Adeleke has yet to run the 51.20 qualifying standard over 400m for the European Championships in Birmingham in August, and while that will be the least of her ambitions over the coming weeks, it’s almost two years now since she ran her Irish record of 49.07 to win silver at the European Championships in early June 2024.
Adeleke hasn’t raced on the Diamond League circuit since London last July, after which she later withdrew from the World Championships in Tokyo due to “lingering injuries and continuous setbacks”. She did race once indoors, breaking her own Irish 300m mark.
Sharlene Mawdsley does have the qualifying time for Birmingham, running 51.08 last year, before clocking a sensational 48.34 second split when anchoring Ireland’s women’s 4x400m at the World Athletics Relays in Botswana earlier this month – faster than the 48.45 Adeleke clocked in the 2024 event.
Mark English will open his outdoor season in Shanghai, the Donegal athlete down to race a high-quality men’s 800m, which includes his occasional training partner Peter Bol from Australia. They are both coached by Justin Rinaldi. The 33-year-old English broke his Irish 800m record three times last summer, before Cian McPhillips lowered it significantly to 1:42.15 to finish fourth at the World Championships in Tokyo.
English is also down to race the Rome Diamond League, where Sarah Healy is listed to race the 5,000m. The 2025 European Indoor champion over 3,000m is possibly eyeing up a move to the longer distance this season.
