Rhasidat Adeleke will make her first appearance since the European Athletics Championships when she contests the 100m at the Banca Valsabbina Grand Prix Brescia on Sunday August 30th.
The meeting will bring an immediate reunion with Amy Hunt, who beat Adeleke to the European 200m title in Birmingham. This time the pair will meet over 100m, with Jamaican sprinters Tia Clayton and Brianna Lyston also included in a field packed with major championship experience.
The race will give Adeleke another chance to build the competitive rhythm that two hamstring injuries denied her for much of the outdoor season. It also continues her recent move towards the shorter sprints after her 400m campaign was disrupted.
The Tallaght Star After a Remarkable European Silver
Adeleke will arrive in Brescia with a very different outlook from the one she carried into the National Championships at the end of July.
Her year had begun encouragingly with an Irish indoor 300m record of 36.30 seconds in February, but two separate hamstring strains then cost her around four weeks of training each. When she returned to the 400m at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene in early July, she finished ninth in 52.26 seconds, more than three seconds outside the 49.07 Irish record she set at the 2024 European Championships.
That run made clear how much preparation she had lost. Adeleke changed course and returned to the 200m, the event in which she first made her name as a junior. Her first attempt brought a 23.07 in Lucerne, leaving her with one final opportunity to secure her place in Birmingham.
She took it in Santry. Adeleke won the Irish title in 22.80 seconds despite a stiff headwind, achieved the European qualification standard and moved into the top 12 seeds, allowing her to advance directly to the semi finals.
Less than three weeks later, she won her European semi final in a season best 22.43. That placed her second among the qualifiers, behind Hunt, and abruptly changed the conversation from simply making the final to contending for a medal.
Adeleke then produced the fastest 200m of her career and a national record to boot in the final. Her late charge carried her past Dina Asher Smith and into second place in 22.28 seconds. Hunt won in a European leading 22.19, while Asher Smith took bronze in 22.29, only one hundredth of a second behind Adeleke.
The result lowered her own national record of 22.34 that she had held since 2023. It also placed her alongside Sonia O’Sullivan as one of only two Irish athletes to win European Championship medals in two individual events, following her 400m silver in Rome in 2024.
The medal mattered, but so did the manner of the performance. Adeleke felt her start and transition in the final were far from perfect, yet she still ran faster than ever. She said afterwards that she needed more racing to settle on the exact plan required to go quicker. Brescia now provides the first of those repetitions.
A Different Test Against Amy Hunt
The rematch will not be a direct repeat of Birmingham. Cutting the distance in half changes the demands of the contest and leaves little room for a mistake.
Adeleke’s strength over 200m was clear in Birmingham, where she closed hard through the final stages. Over 100m, the start and acceleration carry even greater importance. A slow opening 30 metres cannot easily be repaired once a field of this quality is moving at full speed.
She is far from a novice at the distance. Adeleke holds the Irish 100m record of 11.13 seconds, set in June 2024, although the event has usually played a supporting role beside her 200m and 400m campaigns.
Hunt will arrive as the newly crowned European 100m champion after winning in 11.00 seconds in Birmingham. She followed that with the 200m title, then collected gold in the women’s 4x100m relay and the new mixed 4x100m relay. The mixed team ran a European record of 39.97 seconds as Hunt became the first athlete to claim four gold medals at a single European Athletics Championships.
That makes Brescia a useful comparison of two athletes coming from very different seasons. Hunt has raced frequently and is in the richest form of her career. Adeleke has had far fewer opportunities, but her 22.28 in Birmingham proved that her top speed has returned.
Brescia Field Packed With Sprint Quality
Adeleke and Hunt are only two of the leading names announced for the Brescia 100m.
Tia Clayton and Brianna Lyston bring Jamaican sprint quality to the race, while Brittany Brown, Jenna Prandini, Ashanti Moore and Sabrina Dockery add further American strength. Italian teenager Kelly Doualla is also listed to compete in front of a home crowd.
Several women in the field have already broken 11 seconds, meaning Adeleke will receive an immediate measure of her current 100m level. A personal best would require her to improve on 11.13, but the time will not be the only useful part of the exercise. A clean start and a strong first half of the race would provide further evidence that she is regaining the consistency lost during her injury lay offs.
The 100m appearance should not be read as a final decision on Adeleke’s future at 400m. Her 49.07 Irish record and fourth place at the Paris Olympics remain proof of her standing over one lap. For now, the shorter events offer a route back to regular competition without pretending that an interrupted 400m preparation can simply be restored late in the season.
Adeleke is also due to race the 200m at the Athlos meetings in London on September 18th and New York on October 2nd. Brescia is therefore the next step in a longer late season programme, not a one off outing after Birmingham.
The European silver already transformed the direction of her summer. Sunday week will tell us a little more about how quickly she can turn that breakthrough into a run of performances, with the athlete who denied her gold standing in the lane beside her once again.
