Obiri makes 1500m bow ahead of Birmingham show

World 5000m champion Hellen Obiri will make a rare World Indoor 1500m act when the IAAF series resumes with the Copernicus Cup in Torun on Thursday.

While she’s made her career over longer distances, she’s hardly a slouch in the metric mile, boasting bests of 3:57.05 outdoors and 4:05.82 indoors, both from 2014.

The World 5000m champion’s speed will be on show at the northern Polish city as she returns to action looking to gauge her speed and fitness before deciding whether she will compete in the 3,000m and 1,500m races at the World Indoor championships in Birmingham.

The first three series winners will be crowned at the city best known as the birthplace of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, the famed Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that revolutionised the way we look at the stars by placing the sun at its centre.

No events will be more attentively followed by the sell-out crowd of 5200 expected than the pole vault where Polish jumpers Piotr Lisek and Pawel Wojciechowski will be key players in the highly-charged battle for the title.

Lisek, the winner of the Dusseldorf leg, arrives as the Tour leader with 17 points, two ahead of Konstadinos Filipidis of Greece, with a 5.86m season’s best to his credit. Filipidis meanwhile, the 2014 world indoor champion, is riding high after equalling his 5.85m national record when winning in Madrid last week.

Raphael Holzdeppe, the Karlsruhe winner, and Wojciechowski each arrive with 10 points, mathematically still in the hunt – but lots of stars will have to align for things to go their way. Besides an outright victory for either, Lisek will have to finish no better than fifth and Filipidis no higher than fourth.

In the shot put, which kicks off the early evening programme, Tour leader Tomas Stanek will make his Tour victory official following the late hour withdrawal of Croatia’s Stipe Zunic, the only man with a mathematical possibility of upsetting the rising Czech star.

But even before Zunic’s withdrawal, unseating Stanek would have been exceedingly difficult, Undefeated in three competitions this winter, Stanek’s winning efforts of 22.17m, 21.69m and 21.61m are all better than anyone else has thrown this season.

-Material sourced from iaaf.org