Wightman braced for daunting Diamond challenge

JAKE WIGHTMAN’S brutal summer schedule continues at tonight’s Diamond League leg in Monaco — with the Scot admitting he is still trying to recover from his sapping stint at the Commonwealth Games. Gold at the World Championships was followed by bronze in Birmingham, and now the 28-year-old will race the men’s 1,000metres at the star-studded Herculis meeting just four days after running out of steam in the Midlands. But there is still a major championship double available with the Europeans in Munich approaching around the bend next week. And Wightman claims that the way in which he got so much wrong in his Olympic bid last summer has helped him to get so much right 12 months on. ‘I’ve been pretty relaxed with the whole experience this year compared to last year,’ he said. ‘I was willing to accept whatever would happen, whether that was a medal or not, as long as I gave the best account of myself. Whereas I feel like in Tokyo, I was so obsessed with getting a medal that, as a result, I didn’t run a true reflection on myself in the final, which is like the most disappointing bit.’ Tuning up for the 800m at the Euros, the infrequently run one kilometre is a perfect conversion course for the golden boy, with Kenya’s world 800m champion Emmanuel Korir and Canada’s bronze medallist Marco Atop offering a perfect benchmark for his switch of distance. ‘It’s going to be quick,’ Wightman forecast. ‘Most of that field will have had a few weeks to rest up after the Worlds whereas I’ll be going straight from the Commies. So I did have a think about whether I’d want to race again so close to Europeans. But I want to keep testing myself and it is a slightly shorter distance.’ Jemma Reekie will run the women’s 800m in a rehearsal for Munich that will allow the Scot to blow off the cobwebs of missing out on the medals in Birmingham. With her training partner Laura Muir opting to skip Monaco, world champion Faith Kipyegon will be favourite in the women’s 1500m while Daryll Neita, who took bronze for England in Brum, squares off in the 100m against global gold medallist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, with the Jamaican rested after giving the Commonwealths a miss. Meanwhile, double Commonwealth medallist Eilish McColgan will step up her preparations for her October marathon debut by running the Big Half in London on September 4, it has been announced.