Larissa Iapichino has been confirmed as the headline jumper for the women's long jump at the Wanda Diamond League season opener in Shanghai/Keqiao on 16 May, where the 24-year-old Italian will begin the defence of back-to-back overall titles. Six victories in 2025 carried Iapichino to a second straight Diamond League trophy and confirmed her as the most consistent technician on the circuit, and Keqiao is the first chance to set the tone for a season that runs all the way to the two-day Brussels final on 4-5 September.
Iapichino arrives in China as world number three after taking silver behind Tara Davis-Woodhall at the World Indoor Championships in Poland in March. Indoor form has tended to follow her into the European outdoor season, and her coaches have publicly targeted both the Budapest Ultimate Championship in mid-September and the Diamond League points table — a combination that puts a premium on opening every meeting with a clean board and at least one jump beyond 6.80 m, the threshold she cleared in five of her six 2025 wins.
The Keqiao field, announced this week, ranks as the deepest non-championship long-jump entry of the past decade. World Championships bronze medallist Natalia Linares of Colombia returns after a winter cut short by hamstring trouble, and 2025 world indoor champion Claire Bryant of the United States arrives off a personal best of 6.96 m from the indoor circuit. Croatia's Marija Tolj, Brazil's Letícia Oro Melo and Switzerland's Annik Kälin complete a six-jumper line-up that pits four different national champions against one another inside the first weekend of the outdoor calendar.
Keqiao will be Iapichino's first appearance at a Diamond League meeting in mainland China and she has spoken about wanting to add the venue to a list that already includes wins in Florence, Stockholm, Lausanne, Zurich, Monaco and Brussels. Italian federation officials confirmed she will fly to Shanghai with her father and coach Giancarlo Iapichino on 12 May after a final preparation block at Formia, with the European Team Championships in Madrid on 30-31 May the next stop on a schedule that builds toward Stockholm on 7 June.
Beyond the head-to-head intrigue, the early-season Diamond League opener carries weighting that the calendar's late legs do not. The new format introduced for 2026 awards a 1.5 multiplier to scoring at the first three meetings of the year, an attempt to keep top names from skipping the season's opening weeks; that change explains why Keqiao has assembled a deeper field on paper than the Eugene Prefontaine Classic in early July. For Iapichino, opening with a podium would all but guarantee qualification for the season-ending final and would lay down a marker in a year when both the Tokyo Worlds in mid-September and the Budapest Ultimate Championship a week later are in play.