Norway’s world champion has faced his fellow 22-year-old Abderrahman Samba – Qatar’s adopted athlete from Mauritania - in Diamond League races, and on each occasion, in Rome, Oslo and then Stockholm, he has finished second.

In so doing, the ebullient Warholm has lowered his national record to 47.81sec, but Samba has made even better headway, lowering his own Diamond League and Asian record to 47.41 in Stockholm.

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Rai Benjamin of Antigua and Barbuda has announced his own extraordinary claim to dominance in the event with victory in pouring rain at the National Collegiate Athletic Association finals in Eugene in 47.02, equalling the second best time ever run, set by the legendary Ed Moses, and bettered only by the world record of 46.78 set by Kevin Young of the United States in winning the 1992 Olympic title.

Benjamin is in Paris, but will be running in a 200m outside the main Diamond League programme.

So another mano a mano struggle is in prospect tomorrow - although it could yet turn out to be mano a mano a mano given the presence of the British Virgin Islands athlete who beat Warholm to the Diiamond League title in last year’s final, Kyron McMaster, winner of the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast in April. 

The Olympic champion from the US, Kerron Clement, is also in the field. Moses’ 1986 meeting record of 47.66 looks in serious danger…

The IAAF Diamond League is now at its halfway point on the road to the two finals that lie ahead in Zurich and Brussels, and Paris will be presenting a stacked field as it seeks to match the stupendous athletics spectacle that took place in Stockholm’s 1912 Olympic Stadium on June 10.

The 8.83 metres long jump recorded in Sweden by Cuba’s 19-year-old Juan Miguel Echevarria – frustratingly in a following wind just 0.1mps over the limit allowable for record purposes – electrified not just the evening, but the event.

Between them, will this brilliant new Cuban talent and South Africa’s irrepressible Olympic silver medallist and world champion Luvo Manyonga take the long jump to new territory in the way that US rivals Carl Lewis and Mike Powell did in 1991 when the latter was pushed to the world record of 8.95m?

The Meeting de Paris cannot start to answer that question – no men’s long jump is scheduled in a competition whose slogan is "Speed in Paris".

But it will be able to offer another gripping instalment for the Stockholm storyline which would have earned top billing on most Diamond League evenings, namely the struggle in the men’s pole vault between the US world champion Sam Kendricks, the renascent French world record holder Renaud Lavillenie, and the prodigious 18–year-old Swede Armand Duplantis who beat them both on his home ground with an effort of 5.86m.

"Height in Paris" could be the operative unofficial slogan here – as it will be for the efforts of Mariya Lasitskene, the double world high jump champion, who will compete here as an Authorised Neutral Athlete in search of her 44th consecutive victory since April last year.

The Russian, seeking to better her season-leading effort of 2.03m, faces serious opposition in the form of Belgium’s world and Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam, who has cleared 2.01m this year, Bulgaria’s Mirela Demireva, who cleared 2.00m in finishing second to Lasitskene in Stockholm, and Ukraine’s world silver medallist Yuliya Levchenko.

The "Speed in Paris" tag starts to make sense when one inspects some of the track athletes involved in what promises to be a hot night of sprinting action.

With the European Athletics Championships in Berlin looming on the horizon, home talent Jimmy Vicaut, who has run 9.92 this season, will be able to test himself to the max in the concluding event of the programme against a 100m field that includes Ronnie Baker, who set a legal personal best of 9.90 in finishing second behind Noah Lyles’s season-leading 9.88 at the US Championships in Des Moines last weekend.

Also in the mix will be South Africa’s Commonwealth Games champion Akani Simbine, who has run 9.98 this year, Baker’s compatriot Michael Rodgers, second in this year’s world rankings with 9.89, and Jamaica’s 2011 world champion Yohan Blake.

The women’s 100m will feature the sprinter who took world silver over 100 and 200m last year, but who is now moving up to gold standard – Marie-Josee Ta Lou.

The 29-year-old Ivorian has the two fastest 100m timings so far this season, with a personal best of 10.85, but in Paris she is seeking a performance that will give the world lists for 200m – headed by Nigeria’s Blessing Okagbare-Ighoteguonor on 22.04 and The Bahamas Olympic 400m champion Shaunae Miller-Uibo on 22.06 - a new look.

Such is the strength – and speed – in depth gathered for the 110m hurdles that two heats will be required to sort out a field which features the athlete currently heading the world lists with 12.99, world silver medallist Sergey Shubenkov, Spain’s Cuban-born Olympic silver medallist Orlando Ortega, who set a personal best of 12.94 in Paris three years ago, and last year’s winner at the Charlety Stadium, Ronald Levy of Jamaica, who has run 13.16 this year and secured the Commonwealth Games title.

South Africa’s world and Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya, whose Federation is mobilising to oppose the measures on monitoring testosterone levels in women athletes that have been proposed for November by the IAAF, will seek to extend her winning record against a field that includes the Olympic silver and bronze medallists from Rio 2016, respectively Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui.