Mark English maintains his consistency at Diamond League in London

Mark English maintained his encouraging summer at a Diamond League meet in London on Saturday afternoon.

In a loaded 800m field, including the Olympic gold and silver medalists from last summer, English recorded the third fastest time of his career.

The Finn Valley AC athlete finished seventh and wasn't far off his Irish record in 1:44.07 at Novuna London Athletics Meet, the latest stop for the Diamond League.

Under a grey sky in The Big Smoke, temperatures rose beyond 20 degrees, but the track at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park squelched under the strain of heavy rainfall. 

The 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo are still a little under two months away, but many of the lead protagonists were here.

Of the 11 men going under starter’s orders by the Thames, five lined up in last year’s 800m final at the Olympic Games.

Ethiopia’s Emmanuel Wanyoni, the Olympic gold medalist in 2024, and Marco Arop of Canada, the silver medallist, added real prestige to proceedings.

As it happened, Wanyoni won in 1:42.00, ahead of Arop in 1:42.22 - placings just as they were in Paris.

Home favourite Max Burgin came home third in a 1:42.36 personal best with Bryce Hoppel from the United States (1:42.71) Mohamed Attaoui of Spain (1:43.01) completing the top five.

Burgin, Hoppel and Attaoui all raced in the 2024 Olympic final at the Stade de France, while Donovan Brazier from the US was sixth, in a. Season’s best of 1:43.08.

Pacemaker Patrick Sieradzki from Poland took them around in a 49.2-second opening lap.

English stayed at the back of the field before getting past a couple of rivals, including old adversary Andreas Kramer from Sweden, with whom the Letterkenny native shared lane 2 with at the start.

The 32-year-old doctor has broken the Irish record twice this summer, going sub-1:44 for the first time when clocking 1:43.92 at the FBK Games in Hengelo, Netherlands in June having gone 1:44.34 at the Irena Szewińska Memorial in Bydgoszcz, Poland 10 nights earlier.

English flew to the Sierra Nevada mountains after a 1:43.98 showing at a Diamond League meet in Paris a month ago - the second fastest time of his career. 

Mark English after the race. Photo: Eric Bellamy

His new partnership with coach Justin Rinaldi and the Fast 8 Track Club has been showing good dividends.

In March, English won the European Indoor Championships bronze medal, bursting home in 1:45.46 in Apeldoorn.

English narrowly missed out on competing at this venue at the 2012 Olympic Games in London - the Games for which the venue was constructed. However, his first time below 1:45 was here in 2013 when going 1:44.84, qualifying him for the World Championships in Moscow, and he was back to finish fourth two years later.

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Earlier in the afternoon, the Irish women’s 4x100m relay team clocked a new national record.

Sarah Leahy, Ciara Neville, Lauren Roy and Sarah Lavin finished fourth in 43.73 seconds. That time takes out the previous best of 43.80, set by Joan Healy, Phil Healy, Ciara Neville and Gina Akpe-Moses at the 2018 European Championships in Berlin.

Great Britain won in a new world lead time of 41.69, ahead of Jamaica (42.50) and France (43.54). 

Sarah Healy scorched a new PB of 4:16.26 for third in the women’s 1 mile and the national record, 4:15.58, held by Ciara Mageean, is now firmly in sight, while Rhasidat Adeleke dropped down to the 200m and was fourth in 22.52 seconds.