Confirmed entry lists for Sunday's Meeting International Mohammed VI in Rabat now include Yaroslava Mahuchikh, Emmanuel Wanyonyi and home favourite Soufiane El Bakkali, each opening their 2026 Diamond League campaigns on a card that also features Ditaji Kambundji, Valarie Sion and Isaac Nader. The Moroccan meeting is the third leg of the Wanda Diamond League season after Shanghai-Keqiao on 16 May and Xiamen last weekend, and one of the most attractive stops on the early-season circuit for athletes returning from indoor or training blocks.
El Bakkali's appearance is the centrepiece of the men's card. The two-time Olympic 3000m steeplechase champion has built much of his outdoor schedule around a Rabat-Paris-Eugene early arc in recent years, and a clean run in front of a home crowd would set him up nicely for a Doha and Lausanne sequence in early summer. Organisers have not yet confirmed every name in the steeple field, but the depth of the men's middle-distance entries through Wanyonyi's 800m and Nader's expected 1500m suggests Rabat will function as both a sharpener for the East African circuit and a measuring stick for the European squad that did not race indoors.
The women's card carries the broadest variety of disciplines on the 2026 calendar so far. In addition to the standard fourteen Diamond League events split seven-and-seven by gender, organisers in Rabat are running two additional women's events outside the discipline rotation, a 100m hurdles and a 1500m. Kambundji headlines the short hurdles after a winter that saw her clamber up the all-time indoor list, while Sion's mile presence has been confirmed in the field by the Diamond League's own preview, with Nader expected to provide a Portuguese counterpoint to a Kenyan and Ethiopian core in the men's metric mile.
Mahuchikh's high jump return is the kind of mid-table headliner that the Diamond League quietly relies upon. The Ukrainian world record holder has not raced outdoors since her late-season campaign last summer and arrives in Rabat with a stated preference for an early competition over the Doha or Oslo openers that several of her rivals have chosen. Expect a controlled opener around 1.94m to 1.98m rather than anything close to her 2.10m world record, although Rabat's warm late-evening conditions have historically helped jumpers find rhythm faster than the cooler northern European venues.
Live coverage of the meeting runs through the Wanda Diamond League's broadcast partners and on the league's own channels for territories without a primary holder. Entry lists were published in two batches across the past fortnight and a final start list with lane draws is expected on Saturday afternoon. The 2026 season then runs straight into Stockholm's Bauhaus-Galan on 7 June, where Mondo Duplantis is set for his hometown return and Cooper Lutkenhaus will make his Diamond League debut over 800m.