(REUTERS) – In a sports-loving Oregon city thousands of miles from London’s Olympic Stadium, the three fastest hurdlers of all-time are set to line up Saturday for what is widely expected to be a preview of the Games’ final. Just weeks before the U.S. Olympic trials at the same site, Cuban Olympic champion, Dayron Robles, races the man whom he succeeded as the world record holder, China’s Liu Xiang, and top American David Oliver in the Prefontaine Classic at Eugene, Oregon.
The competition will be Robles’s first in the United States and it has major implications.
“You can look at Prefontaine and take out the fourth American and then add one other person and you can pretty much say this is the potential Olympic final,” Oliver told Reuters via telephone from his Florida training base.
In addition to the fastest three 110 metres hurdlers ever, the Diamond League meeting features U.S. world champion Jason Richardson, U.S. world indoor gold medallist Aries Merritt and British world bronze medallist Andy Turner.
Richardson grabbed the world gold after Robles, the race winner, was disqualified for interfering with Liu.
The two have not met outdoors since the clash, and their 2012 seasons have gotten off to contrasting starts.
The often-injured Robles has lost two consecutive races in the Caribbean after an early-season win but coach Santiago Antunez said the world record holder was in better form than expected at this stage of the year.
“There is not even a hint of injury,” Antunez told Reuters after a full-speed workout in Havana.