IT WILL BE GREAT!

Despite several of Jamaica’s top athletes set to compete, retired Jamaican-born Olympic and world champion Donovan Bailey admits the World Athletics Ultimate Championships could lose some of its appeal with several of the sport’s biggest stars, including American Noah Lyles, set to miss the event. The inaugural three-day invitational meet, which gets underway on Friday in Budapest, will feature the world’s top 16 athletes in individual track events and the top eight competitors in field events. Gold medallists from the 2024 Paris Olympics, 2025 Tokyo World Championships and this year’s Diamond League final winners earned automatic qualification while the remaining entrants were determined by the World Athletics Ranking for the period from last September to the start of this September.

However, reigning Olympic Games 100m champion and 200m world champion Lyles will be absent due to injury. American star 400m and 400m hurdles star Sydney McLaughlin Levrone, America’s Olympic long jump champion Tara Davis-Woodhall, Kenyan middle-distance star Faith Kipyegon, Kenya’s 800m world champion Lilian Odira, and reigning Olympic and World Champion in the 5000m Faith Kipyegon will also be missing from the championships for different reasons. Former world record holder Bailey, who won 100m gold for Canada at the 1996 Olympics and the 1995 World Championships, says World Athletics will miss the star power but believes it will still be a great event. Jamaican-born former Olympic Games 100m champion Donovan Bailey(Photo: AFP) “I think that anytime that you’re having major championships and this is the ultimate championship [in] it’s first year, the big stars that are missing, it does dampen it a little bit,” he said on CBC Sports . “I think that in any sport, you want to have the…