A mighty convergence of talent will make the women’s 200 metres a track highlight tomorrow as the Diamond League returns to Rome after a year’s gap.

Drummers in traditional dress thumped and thundered their way through last night’s Wanda Diamond League meeting at Rabat’s Stade Prince Moulay Abdellah, a gash of gold and red on the bottom bend of the track, providing the pulse for each of the distance races.

Soufiane El Bakkali, Morocco’s Olympic 3,000 metres steeplechase champion, earned a huge home victory here to electrify an arena which had shortly earlier witnessed Norway’s Olympic 400m hurdles champion Karsten Warholm pull up injured after the first hurdle of his 2022 debut race.

Norway’s 400 metres hurdles Olympic champion and world record holder Karsten Warholm will start his season here tomorrow (June 5) as Morocco hosts its first Diamond League meeting since the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

Trayvon Bromell’s mercurial 100 metres career had an up rather than a down day at the Prefontaine Classic as he earned a victory that may not have been one of his swiftest - in 9.93sec on a blustery afternoon - but might, given the opposition, have been one of his most significant.

The Prefontaine Classic meeting's traditional Friday night distance races, supplemented this year by three fugitive field events from Saturday’s Wanda Diamond League meeting in Eugene, Oregon following forecasts of rain and high winds, failed to produce any hoped-for world records.

It is a measure of Eugene’s Prefontaine Classic meeting - which tomorrow forms the third stop on the Wanda Diamond League tour - that it can lose four Olympic gold medallists at late notice and still remain packed with compelling competition and world record attempts.

Huge victories in the field for Germany’s Malaika Mihambo and Kristjan Ceh of Slovenia, and impressive wins on the track from home athletes Dina Asher-Smith, Keely Hodgkinson and Laura Muir were highlights of a blustery afternoon’s athletics at Birmingham’s re-built Alexander Stadium today.

Normal service was resumed in Doha today as the men’s pole vault, held over because of high winds during yesterday’s opening Wanda Diamond League meeting of the season, duly took place in the lofty environs of the Aspire Dome - and Armand Duplantis won.

An ill-wind that blew the men’s pole vault event out of the opening Wanda Diamond League meeting of the season in Doha did the men’s javelin throwers, and Anderson Peters in particular, good tonight as Grenada’s world champion won with a last throw of 93.07 metres to go fifth on the all-time list.

World Athletics chief executive Jon Ridgeon has praised the attitude and support of the Diamond League’s title sponsor, Wanda, following the announcement that, for the second year running, the Shanghai and Shenzhen meetings would not go ahead because of COVID-19 concerns.

On Thursday (May 13) Doha is due to host the opening Diamond League meeting of the season at the Qatar Sports Club Stadium.

Both the Chinese meetings on this season’s Diamond League schedule - in Shanghai and Shenzhen - have been cancelled due to continuing concerns over COVID-19, with Silesia stepping up to fill the gap.

A dizzying array of Olympic champions will be on show at the Stade de la Pontaise in Lausanne tomorrow night for the first of four European meetings that will bring this season's Diamond League to its conclusion, watched by an expected capacity crowd of 12,200.

As Tweets go it’s brief. It comes from the world 200 metres world champion, Noah Lyles, and it says this: "Noah without a crowd = 19.74 Noah with a crowd = 19.52."