Examining Queen Val’s Diamond League Dominance
Valerie Adams did not win the Diamond League event in Brussels late last week. That’s alright, she didn’t need to. All she had to do was turn up and she had herself a fifth career Diamond Race trophy.
Of course it would have been nice to win another event and to beat Michelle Carter again but Carter is the Olympic champ for a reason. Val’s best throw travelled 19.57m in the picturesque Belgian capital, which was well short of Carter’s 19.98m winning distance (and comfortably short of what each of them managed in Rio). But all goods. The bigger picture was that with the 12 points that she claimed towards the overall competition, Adams extended her already unassailable lead to add another shiny diamond-topped trophy to the mantel.
Having not competed in Doha in May, the first event in the women’s shot put calendar, Adams then won in Rabat and Rome, before a second place in Birmingham. In the shadow of the Olympics, she then took first in Monaco before her silver medal in Rio. Her season ended with first place in Lausanne and second in Brussels. Four victories and two seconds in the six meets she attended. That is outstanding.
To be fair, it’s not quite as outstanding as Sandra Perkovic managed in the women’s discus where the Croatian Olympic gold medallist won every event for a maximum of 80 points (Val had 58 in her event) but that’d be splitting hairs. See, Perkovic has won five Diamond Race trophies in her career. Valerie Adams has also won five Diamond Race trophies in her career. No other woman in the world can match those two achievements.
In fact if you expand the list out then the only athlete with more DR titles is the great Renaud Lavillenie, who has won the men’s pole vault in every one of the seven years that the Diamond League has existed for. He only took silver in the Olympics though, he was the dude that got booed on the podium by the Brazilian fans. But he’s a legend so he went and won his seventh one of these bad boys after Rio ended. Christian Taylor did win gold in Rio, he also won his fifth DR this month. Piotr Malachowski won in 2016 but took silver in Rio as well.
That actually tells a bit of a story about the Diamond League, which has slightly restricted entry and shorter start lists and because of the nature of the extended tournament you don’t always see huge consistency in who competes from meet to meet. But what that does do is it levels out the ‘on the day’ athletes who might turn up and do something stunning at the Olympics but struggle to repeat that on the regular. That’s why the likes of Adams, Lavillenie, Perkovic and Taylor are all so great – they can hit their marks over and over again and that’s reflected in their Diamond League results. Here’s the full list of people to have won four or more DR titles:
Tightening the focus now to Queen Val, her Diamond League exploits don’t tend to get the most publicity in NZ other than the usual ‘yes, she won!’ breeze-over on the news or whatever. That’s because constant superiority is something people quickly take for granted. Valerie Adams has competed in 39 shot put meets within the Diamond League calendar in her career. Of those 39 she has finished in the top three on 37 occasions and taken first place on 28 occasions. Unsurprisingly the only folks with more individual event wins than Val are Perkovic (34) and Lavillenie (32).
There aren’t many kiwi athletes out there who can compete with that kind of sustained excellence, and this is coming off some serious injury issues last year and early this year too. Even her own brother is in awe of what she does.
Steven Adams: "I thought I worked hard, and a lot of people say I do as well, but seeing her work is on a whole other level. It's absolutely unbelievable. The most disciplined person in the world and just the hardest worker."
Put simply, she’s one of the most dominant sporting competitors on the planet and if we already knew that then it doesn’t hurt to stop and take stock now and then. And for those of you (*cough* NZ Herald *cough*) who are fixated with how much money members of the Adams family earn, well this Diamond League season alone netted Val a tasty US$107,000 of prize money. And she’s earned every cent of it too.