\u201cI am really happy to have received a wildcard for the IAAF Diamond League finale,\u201d said Berlin silver medallist Abdi. \u201cThe 5000 metres will be my first race at the Memorial. And also my last. After this race I am quitting the track to fully focus on next year\u2019s world championship marathon in Qatar.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fantastic to end the first part of my career with a European silver medal. It doesn\u2019t get better than that and I celebrated for weeks in Ghent, where everyone knows me. Now I am back to waking up every day at the same time, getting all the training done and setting goals for the future. That medal didn\u2019t change me. Even looking for additional sponsors will have to wait until after the season." <\/p>\n
Abdi is really looking forward to his run at the AG Memorial Van Damme. \u201cAs a participant I followed the Memorial many times," the 29-year-old added. "The enthusiasm, the public \u2026 you can\u2019t find that anywhere in the world. Even the world championships and the Rio Olympic Games can\u2019t top that. The track in Brussels is also very fast and the pacemakers provide a consistently fast pace. I won\u2019t repeat my mistake from the Night of Athletics in Heusden. I want to be relaxed and enjoy the first three kilometres and try to overtake the others in the final two when they are starting to struggle. I want to show what I can do in front of my home crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traditionally the week leading up to the AG Memorial Van Damme is packed with daily press...","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"city":[],"class_list":["post-3345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brussels"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3345"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brussels.wdl.uat-sports.swisstiming.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=3345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}