Just over two weeks before the event, the list of participants in the Grifone Meeting – City of Asti is being completed in all the races included in the program. In speed, while waiting to define the starters of a 100 meters which promises to be very interesting, the presence in Asti of two 400 meters specialists who will be on stage at the next Paris Olympics: Leungo Scotch (Botswana), who in April brought his personal best to 44″54, and Oleksandr Pohorilko (Ukraine) who last week improved his country’s record in Curaçao to 44″94, the best European performance of the year. Pohorilko (in the photo credit Noc Ukraine) will therefore be one of the possible protagonists at the next European Championships in Rome (7-12 June). The two will be played by a pair of expert four-centimeter runners: Boniface Mweresa (Kenya), 31 years old but still capable of 44″96 in 2002, and Mazen Al-Yasen (Saudi Arabia), born in 1996, 45″06 two seasons ago.
At the Asti meeting there will be no shortage of Italian stars, starting with Leonardo Fabbri, who recently rose to 22.88, the best world performance of the year in the shot put, stimulated by the other Italian Zane Weir in his hunt for Alessandro Andrei’s Italian record (22.91). The Olympic and world champion and record holder Ambra Sabatini will take to the track in the Paralympic 100 metres. In the middle distance, in an 800 meters embellished by the presence of the Olympic silver medalist Ferguson Rotich (Kenya) (1’42″54 his best time) the young Francesco Pernici, 20 years old, will be competing, for whom the Italian technicians expect a qualitative leap after the excellent 1’45”23 last year in the junior category.
The meeting, which is held in Asti for the first time after its debut in Castiglione della Pescaia and Grosseto, will be officially presented on Tuesday 21 May, with a press conference in the Pastrone room of the Teatro Alfieri in Asti in the presence of some of the athletes in race two days later at the school camp in via Gerbi.
