Athletics world championships: second weekend to decide our fate

The second weekend of the London world championships will decide how successful the Australian team’s campaign will be.

Sally Pearson racing against USA’s Kendra Harrison in Monaco last month.

This first weekend of the world championships is all about Usain Bolt’s last hurrah but the second weekend will decide how successful the Australian team’s campaign will be in London.

The schedule is back-end loaded for the Australian team. In the last two days of the championships, Australia’s top four medal contenders will all have their moments of truth.

Next Saturday night, hurdler Sally Pearson gets her chance to prove she can return to the top after a four-year absence from the global medal podiums due to injury.

Pearson will compete in the very stadium that hosted her greatest triumph, winning the Olympic gold medal in 2012.

“Deep down, I would love a medal, any colour,’’ she says. “Knowing that I have achieved in this stadium before and knowing I’m coming back again, probably not as the favourite to win but certainly a contender to at least medal or make a final or whatever, that sits well with me.

“But it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be one of the hardest races that I have ever done in my whole career, even harder than going for gold in London.’’

American world record-holder Kendra (Keni) Harrison has been the outstanding competitor this year and will be the outright favourite for gold but Pearson should believe she can hold her own against all the other competitors and gatecrash the US team’s hopes of a repeat of last year’s Olympic medal sweep.

And if Harrison does not hold her nerve at her first world championships, then the world title will also be in play.

The morning after Pearson runs for glory, Australia’s leading walkers, Jared Tallent and Dane-Bird-Smith, the national team’s only Olympic medallists in Rio, will enter the fray.

Tallent is a perennial medallist in the 50km walk but has faced new challenges this year after becoming a father and working with a new coach because his former trainer, his wife Claire, was about to give birth.

GRAPHIC: The program highlights

Bird-Smith, who stepped up to the podium for the first time with bronze in Rio, believes he’s in ­career-best form and capable of building on his medal performance last year.

“I am chasing medals. I am here for the business end,” he said.

“I have a pretty good idea of the top four guys, and I am very confident in the last five kilometres I can turn it on.’’

The Bird could be the word in London.

Meanwhile, former world discus champion Dani Stevens will have to wait for the final night of competition to find out if she can return to the podium eight years after her breakthrough triumph in Berlin in 2009.

Stevens battled illness in the lead-up to last year’s Rio Olympics and fell just short of the medals, finishing fourth. This year she is fit, healthy and confident she has made technical improvements after moving to Sydney where she has been able to work daily under the watchful eye of her long-term coach, Denis Knowles.

National head coach Craig Hilliard has set the Australian team’s goal at two medals for the world championships, arguing that it is a largely inexperienced team that will develop further in the three years leading to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“This is our next crop (of athletes) for the next four-year cycle, and that’s important in terms of expectation, although we have got core group of medal hopes,’’ he said.

Another seasoned competitor who could put herself in medal contention is javelin thrower Kathryn Mitchell, who finished sixth in Rio last year,

Among the youngsters looking to establish themselves among the top rank of international competitors are distance runner Patrick Tiernan, world junior pole vault medallist Kurtis Marschall, and javelin thrower Kelsey-Lee Roberts.

All have set personal bests on their way to London and are pressing for places in their first world championships finals.