Track and field season heads into the home straight

After a month-long hiatus that included the Commonwealth Games, the Diamond League track and field circuit resumed today with a special men's pole vault "city event" in the heart of Lausanne, Switzerland. Swedish star Armand Duplantis, winner of back-to-back Olympic gold medals and three straight world championships, won it with a meet-record vault of 6.21 metres before failing on his crowd-pleasing attempts at 6.32m, which would have broken his own world record by one centimetre.

Today's festivities kicked off the final stretch of the global track and field season, which features the Diamond League Final and the brand-new World Athletics Ultimate Championship.

Here's a roadmap to what's coming up.

Only three regular-season meets remain before the Diamond League champions are crowned at the Final in Brussels on Sept. 4 and 5. And two of them take place over the next few days. 

Today's pole-vault competition was an amuse-bouche for Lausanne's main event on Friday at Stade Olympique de la Pontaise.

The menu there includes a delicious men's 800m matchup between all three medallists from the 2024 Paris Olympics: Kenya's Emmanuel Wanyonyi, Canada's Marco Arop and Algeria's Djamel Sedjati. The 200m races feature reigning Olympic men's champion Letsile Tebogo of Botswana, two-time women's world champ Shericka Jackson of Jamaica and Great Britain's Amy Hunt, the silver medallist at last year's worlds.

You can watch the meet live from 2-4 p.m. ET on CBC Gem or catch a replay on the CBC TV network from 3-5 p.m. ET. The men's 800 is at 2:40 p.m. ET, and the 200s go at 2:15 p.m. ET (women's) and 3:41 p.m. ET (men's). Here's the full schedule. 

On Saturday, the action shifts to Poland's massive Silesian Stadium, which will host some