Fresh off a dominant opening victory at the Wanda Diamond League’s first 2025 stop in Shanghai/Keqiao, two-time World Athletics Championships 200m gold medalist Shericka Jackson is set to target consecutive wins at the tour’s next stop, held at Xiamen’s Egret Stadium in China. The race, which kicks off Saturday morning Jamaica time, will see Jackson chase more than just another win — she aims to avenge a surprise defeat to American sprinter Anavia Battle when she opened her 2024 Diamond League campaign in the same city a year prior.
Jackson, who has navigated a string of nagging injuries over the past two seasons, turned heads last week with an impressive opening performance, clocking 22.07 seconds in the 200m just 48 hours after touching down in China. With a full week of acclimatization and training under her belt ahead of the Xiamen meet, track analysts and fans widely expect the Jamaican star to shave time off her already strong opening result and deliver an even faster performance this weekend.
Jackson will face off against nearly the exact same field of competitors that lined up against her in Shanghai/Keqiao. Battle, who finished third in the opener last week, will look to defend her 2024 Xiamen victory against Jackson. Joining the pair on the starting line will be Shaunae Miller-Uibo of The Bahamas, who claimed second place in the opening meet, alongside American sprinters Jenna Prandini and Sha’Carri Richardson.
Jackson is far from the only Jamaican star set to compete in Xiamen: a total of nine Jamaican athletes, most of whom already raced in the tour opener, will return to the track this weekend. The full Jamaican contingent includes sprint hurdlers Ackera Nugent, Megan Simmonds, and Danielle Williams in the women’s 100m hurdles; Orlando Bennett in the men’s 110m hurdles; high jumper Lamara Distin; long jumpers Tajay Gayle and Wayne Pinnock; and shot put national record holder Rajindra Campbell. Notably, Campbell and Pinnock are competing just weeks after World Athletics rejected their applications to switch sporting allegiance to Turkey, clearing them to remain competing for Jamaica for the 2025 season.
The women’s 100m hurdles boasts one of the deepest and most competitive fields on the entire Xiamen schedule, featuring gold medalists from each of the last four global championships. American Masai Russell, the reigning Olympic champion, took gold in the opening race last week, where both Danielle Williams and another competitor failed to finish the event. This weekend, Williams will look to put her opening-meet DNF behind her and claim a better result in Xiamen.
Jamaica’s Megan Simmonds, an Olympic medallist, was the highest-placed Jamaican hurdler in Shanghai/Keqiao, finishing fourth with Nugent close behind in sixth. The two Jamaicans will face stiff competition from a stacked field that includes World Championships gold medalist Ditaji Kambundji of Switzerland, World Indoor champion Devynne Charlton of the Bahamas — who set a new national record in the event last week — and reigning world record holder Tobi Amusan of Nigeria.
Orlando Bennett, a medalist at the 2025 World Athletics Championships, will also aim to improve on his opening result. Bennett clocked a 2025 season’s best 13.20 seconds to take fourth place in Shanghai/Keqiao, and will this weekend go head-to-head with world leader Rachid Muratake of Japan, and Americans Jamal Britt and Cordell Tinch, who finished first and second respectively in the opening meet.
Lamara Distin will make her 2025 outdoor season debut in the women’s high jump, where she will compete against Australia’s Eleanor Patterson, American Charity Hufnagel, and Ukraine’s Yulia Levchenko. In the men’s long jump, Jamaicans Tajay Gayle and Wayne Pinnock tied with an identical 7.93m jump in the opener, and both will target personal improvements against a field that includes rising Italian star Mattia Furlani, Australia’s Liam Adcock, home favorite Mingkun Zhang of China, and combined World Championships and Olympic gold medalist Miltiadis Tentoglou of Greece.