Mccartney: I don’t know what went wrong

In the end it was just too big an ask for Eliza Mccartney as her seemingly ill-fated season came to a disappointing end in London.

The 20-year-old Aucklander had been hoping to add a world athletics championships medal to the Olympic bronze she won in the women’s pole vault in Rio last year.

But it was not to be as Mccartney was never able to find her best stuff in the final at London’s Olympic stadium yesterday, with the Kiwi bowing out at a disappointing height of 4.55 metres to finish ninth.

It was well below her season’s best, and Oceania record, of 4.82m she cleared in Auckland back in February.

Mccartney had entered the competition at 4.45m, cleared that at her first attempt, and then made it safely over 4.55m at her second attempt. But the 4.65m height proved the Devonport athlete’s undoing as she never showed the fluency, speed and execution required to clear a mark that would normally be well within her reach.

On her third and final attempt she clipped the bar on the way up and bowed out, in ninth place, with a rueful look and a halfhearted wave to the capacity crowd.

‘‘I put everything out there. I don’t really know what went wrong,’’ Mccartney told New Zealand media in the mixed zone afterwards.

‘‘On the last attempt I put everything into it and I blew through, which means the pole was just too soft and there’s no way I could have jumped it. So it means I jumped well but I was just on the the wrong pole.

‘‘It’s a random place to come, ninth. But still I was in the final, which is pretty exciting at my first world champs,’’ she said.

Hot favourite and Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi of Greece won the gold medal with a fabulous clearance of 4.91m – the fourth best jump of all time. American Sandi Morris, who won the silver in Rio, repeated her runnerup effort with a best height of 4.75m and Cuba’s 2015 champion Yarisley Silva and Venezuela’s Robeiylis Peinado shared bronze with second-time clearances at 4.65m..