Season’s best for English in 800m at Diamond League

Mark English clocked a season’s best time of one minute 44.95 seconds to finish fourth in the 800m at the Bislett Games meeting in Oslo.

The time ran by the Finn Valley clubman was 0.24 of a second off his Irish 800m record and saw him finish 0.28 of a second behind the winner, Tobias Gronstad from Norway at the Diamond League event.

English, who took bronze in the 800m at the 2014 and 2022 European Championships, was earlier this week named in the Irish team that will head to Rome for this year’s Europeans.

The 31-year-old will also have the Paris Olympic Games on his agenda, as he aims for a third appearance at the global event.

Andrew Coscoran was another to take a chunk off his season’s best, the Star of the Sea athlete clocking 3:32.68 in the 1500m to finish 10th, in a race won by Norwegian superstar Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Brian Fay was 18th in the 5,000m, a race that saw Ethiopia’s Hagos Gebrhiwet run the second fastest time ever of 12:36.73, just 1.37 seconds off the mark set by Joshua Cheptegei in 2020.

Cheptegei was ninth while Fay was the seventh European home in 13:30.45.

Olympic 400m hurdles champion Karsten Warholm suffered a rare defeat in front of his home fans as Brazilian Alison dos Santos edged him out to win in 46.63.

But fellow Norwegian Jakob Ingebrigtsen held on to win the men’s 1500m, the 2020 Tokyo Olympic champion diving across the line to beat Kenyan Timothy Cheruiyot in a 2024 best time of 3:29.74.

Britain’s Matthew Hudson-Smith set a new European 400m record with a time of 44.07 seconds, breaking his own European best of 44.26 set at the World Championships in Budapest last August.

On that occasion Hudson-Smith led until the closing stages but was unable to hold off Jamaican Antonio Watson.

Nine months on from that painful defeat Hudson-Smith surged out of the blocks and powered on in the final straight to win by more than half a second from Grenada’s Kirani James, the former world and Olympic champion (44.58) and American Vernon Norwood (44.68).