Pentathlon pair given their dues

TWO years after the event took place, Natalya Coyle and Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe have been awarded bronze medals from the 2015 Pentathlon World Championships. It is a bitter sweet moment for Lanigan O’Keeffe who tweeted yesterday, ‘Delight although at the same time devastated! My grandad & mum travelled to watch that competition & that moment was stolen from us!’ It was a sentiment shared by Coyle, who also took to Twitter. ‘We’ve just been awarded a World Championship bronze medal from 2015! Happy yet sad we couldn’t celebrate on the day,’ wrote Coyle. The Irish pair (above) have been upgraded to third in the mixed relay at the event in Berlin, as silver-medalists Anna Burjak and Maksim Kustov have been stripped of their medal following a failed drugs test for the latter. That moves Americans Nathan Schrimsher and Margaux Isaksen into second with the Irish bumped up to bronze. Lanigan O’Keeffe and Coyle won the pentathlon World Cup final last weekend but, disappointingly, the mixed event will not form part of the pentathlon programme at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.