Paulino pips Nasir, Cherotich beats Chemutai at Paris Diamond League
PARIS, June 20 (Reuters) - Olympic champion Marileidy Paulino outfought Salwa Eid Naser to win the women's 400 metres at the Paris Diamond League meet on Friday, Faith Cherotich won the steeplechase and Grace Stark set a personal best to outgun Tobi Amusan in the 100m hurdles.
Dominican Republic's Paulino needed a season's best time of 48.81, a new meeting record, as the world champion came from behind to pip Bahrain's Naser, who took silver at last year's Olympics.
"All I focused on was to get to through to the finish line feeling strong, although I am not feeling very well, my stomach has been playing up a bit," Paulino said.
Kenyan Cherotich took bronze at the Paris Olympics behind Ugandan silver medallist Peruth Chemutai in the 3,000m steeplechase, and the pair left the rest of the field behind early in the race.
This time 20-year-old Cherotich came out on top as she left her rival behind in the closing metres, with a personal best time of 8:53.37, to repeat her wins in Doha and Oslo.
"It's great that I have already won three Diamond Leagues this season being the youngest in the field," Cherotich said.
"The big goal are the World Championships in Tokyo and I want to win."
Nigeria's world record holder and 2022 world champion Amusan had to settle for second place as American 24-year-old Stark led from the start to win the women's 100m hurdles in 12.21 seconds, knocking one tenth of a second off her personal best.
"I wanted to break that 12.3 so bad, I was really pushing for it in Stockholm," Stark said.
"I'm just so excited to break 12.3, I really knew I could do it this year."
In the men's 400m hurdles, Olympic champion Rai Benjamin barely broke sweat in setting a meeting record 46.93, doing enough down the home straight to hold off Qatar's Abderrahman Samba, who had set the previous record back in 2018.
"I just took it easy because we just had a really fast race in Stockholm. There was no need to come out and force something, especially because the season is so long," Benjamin said.
Ukrainian Olympic high jump champion Yaroslava Mahuchikh broke the world record with a leap of 2.10 meters at last year's meeting, but she could only manage 1.97 this time to take second place behind Australia's Nicola Olyslagers.
The men's 1,500m may not have been a Diamond League event, but the race had the home crowd on their feet as France's Azeddine Habz smashed the national record with a world leading time of 3:27.49.
Habz took almost a second and a half off the previous record set in 2003, and ran the sixth fastest time ever over the distance.
"It's incredible, there is no other word," Habz said.
"I had come to this meeting with the goal of breaking the French record."
Kenya's Phanuel Kipkosgei Koech came second with an impressive 3:27.72, breaking the world under-20 record.
Another non-Diamond League race, the men's 3000m steeplechase, saw the return to the track of Ethiopia's Lamecha Girma after his heavy fall which left him unconscious at the Paris Olympics.
Girma returned to the scene of his world record from 2023, and was happy to get the race, and win, under his belt.
"This is a big thing for me today, especially after the Paris Olympics," Girma said.
"It feels it was a long time ago, so this was very important for me. The legs not much of a problem, but I was a little scared. Now that the race is finished I feel much better."
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The row has now escalated to the point where even Biles' history in testifying against Larry Nassar, the former US team doctor who sexually abused hundreds of female gymnasts, has been weaponised against her. 'All the horrific sexual abuse Simone Biles witnessed and spoke out against caused by one man, yet [she] believes women should be forced to strip naked in front of men to validate the man's feelings,' Gaines said. Many have accused Gaines of going much too far in bringing Nassar's name into the equation, with Stephen A Smith, the most influential sports pundit in America, telling her the tactic was 'really below the belt'. Gaines, however, has held firm. 'I stand by what I said 100 per cent,' she clarified. 'Nassar is a monster, who should spend every day for the rest of his life rotting in jail. But does it get more perverted than standing in a shower totally undressed when a 6ft 4in male, fully naked and fully intact, comes in and watches you shower?' This is the scenario that she alleges she was forced to endure when Thomas was permitted by the National Collegiate Athletics Association to swim competitively as a woman and, by extension, to enter female changing quarters. So, too, does Paula Scanlan, Thomas' former team-mate at the University of Pennsylvania, who says she has suffered 'nightmares' about the experience. To be clear, Biles has not explicitly endorsed the idea of shared changing facilities. But she is under attack because she appears not to have given the implications of her supposedly inclusive philosophy the slightest thought. If she is relaxed about women sharing their sports with men, does this same laissez-faire attitude apply to the showers? And if it does, surely this is the very opposite of what it means to be progressive? 'What is regressive is thinking it's OK to allow any males who say they are trans into women's sex-based spaces, like locker rooms,' Navratilova says. 'That is peak misogyny and peak patriarchy. We women deserve to have privacy, safety and dignity.' For Biles, it never needed to be this way. If she had taken the same care over an incendiary issue as she did over her recent corporate platitudes about the Met Gala and the Kentucky Derby, she could have averted this PR calamity. Instead, she appealed to the bleeding hearts by calling Gaines a 'bully' and wound up looking like the bully herself. Ultimately, Biles has stoked such outrage through the impression she has left of pulling up the bridge behind her. Having forged her own legend thanks to the presence of a women's sporting category, she seems to assume that the girls following in her wake are unworthy of the same protections, that they should simply tolerate the addition of males for the sake of being inclusive. This month, she has a Netflix documentary out that depicts her – not unreasonably, given the scale of her feats – as a champion for women. But that is a credential she has just torched. How can you build a legacy in women's sport while acquiescing in the type of thinking that would lead to the erasure of women's achievements? This is not 2020 any longer, a time when Biles could have been assured of glossy publicity for her trans allyship. It is 2025, and her double standards are laid bare for the world to see.
