Athletics: Golden Olympians in fly-past

Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell, Britain's golden Olympians, will lead the formation at Sheffield tonight in a meeting which will once again fulfil a role as an end-of-term fly-past.

Christie finds himself in a 100 metres field which should provide less of a challenge than choosing which of his outfits he is going to wear to see out the domestic season. We've had the skeleton suit; what's next?

Gunnell, too, looks assured of relatively little demand on her energy in the 400m hurdles - no bad thing, as she plans to run for Essex Ladies in the GRE Jubilee Cup at the same venue tomorrow. The real competitions appear likely to occur elsewhere in a programme studded with Olympic high performers.

At 400m, the new British record-holder, the 19-year-old Dave Grindley, has a chance to see if he can remain closer to Quincy Watts, the young American who swept him and everyone else away in the Barcelona final as he won in 43.50sec. In the 800m, another Olympic champion is thrown to one of Britain's young lions, as William Tanui, of Kenya, is matched once again with Curtis Robb, the 20-year-old medical student, from Liverpool.

In the men's 400m hurdles, Kriss Akabusi, the bronze medallist in Barcelona, takes on the man who finished two places ahead of him in a world-record 46.78, Kevin Young, of the United States.

Mike Powell, the world champion and Olympic silver medallist, competes in the long jump. The two-mile field includes the controversial Olympic 10,000m champion, Khalid Skah. Another Olympic champion, Jan Zelezny, goes in the javelin; sadly, Steve Backley, who threw a British record at the corresponding meeting last year, is not fit enough to challenge him.

Peter Elliott, obliged to miss the Olympics because of injury, will take to the road in Scotland on 13 September when he joins more fortunate Olympic runners in the Princes Street Mile, Edinburgh's new answer to the New York event.

There will be no Mercedes for the winner - as there is in the Big Apple Mile - but a budget of more than pounds 500,000 has attracted a very strong field.

Entries include the present mile world record-holder, Steve Cram, and his old rival, Said Aouita. Other names include Tanui, Rachid El-Basir, of Morocco, the 1500m semi-finalist in Barcelona, and Robb, whose performance should indicate the strength of his and others' opinion that he is ultimately best suited to the 1500m.

The women's entry includes Yvonne Murray, Ellen Van Langen, the Olympic 800m champion, the Olympic 1500m silver medallist, Lyudmila Rogacheva, and the 3,000m Olympic silver medallist and world champion, Tatiana Dorovskikh.