Former world javelin champion will be hoping to end his season with a flourish when he takes to the field at the Zurich Diamond League on Thursday.
Yego is in a race against time to claim his place in the season finale in Brussels and heads to Zurich under pressure to deliver.
The 2015 world champion has endured a difficult season when he qualified for the Olympics through the world rankings and his only win comes from the African Championships, where he claimed a record fifth straight title.
However, for most of the season, it has been a struggle for the 35-year-old, with injuries also hampering him, and heading to Zurich, he must post top results to ensure he is among the top 10 that will qualify for the final and contest the $30,000 (Ksh3.87 million) cash prize plus the Diamond League Trophy.
Yego’s season’s best came at the Paris Olympics when he threw 87.72m to finish fifth overall, having started with a throw of 85.97m, the first time he passed the 85m mark in 2024.
He has since posted 83m at the Lausanne Diamond League which was only enough for a sixth place, having finished a disappointing eighth in at the Doha meeting in May with a throw of 78.37m.
That leaves him in 10th position in the standings, the final slot for qualification to the Diamond League Final, with four points and he cannot afford a poor performance in Zurich if he wants to make the final since Edis Matusevicius of Lithuania, who is 11th with three points, will also be looking to sneak in.
In Zurich, Yego is up against Olympics bronze medallist and two-time world champion Anderson Peters from Grenada and former European champion Julian Weber from neighbouring Germany.
Peters went past the 90m mark in Lausanne for the first time in two years, hitting 90.61m, while Weber, who Yego beat at the Olympics, threw 87.08m at the same meet. It means the Kenyan has a lot of work to do to floor his rivals in the Swiss capital.
