Walsh throws champ’ship record to defend title

Ahoure makes history with 60m win

BIRMINGHAM, England, March 3, (Agencies): Tomas Walsh of New Zealand broke a 31-year-old world indoors athletics championship record to win the shot put on Saturday.

Not content with 22.13 meters with his first shot, defending champion Walsh threw a record 22.31 with his last to gasps from spectators at Arena Birmingham.

Ulf Timmermann set the previous record of 22.24 at the 1987 World Championships in Indianapolis.

“I came here to win but I knew that I would have to throw well to beat these guys,” said Walsh. “It was a crazy competition but I finished with a boom.”

It was a third silver world indoor

Coleman, who smashed Maurice Greene’s 20-year record last month by clocking 6.34 seconds, stumbled on his third step but cruised to victory in 6.71.

Kevin Mayer maintained his lead going into the final event of the heptathlon but the Frenchman’s hopes for gold diminished following a disappointing pole vault performance.

Mayer was second in the 60-meter hurdles, behind closest challenger Damian Warner of Canada and, although he comfortably cleared 5.00 meters in the pole vault, he skipped the next height and failed on all three of his attempts at 5.20.

Warner got a personal best of 4.90 to leave him 34 points behind Mayer overall. If both equal their 1,000-meter times from their most recent completed heptathlon, Warner would end up winning by one point.

Meanwhile, Murielle Ahoure blasted out of her blocks to lead Ivory Coast to a 1-2 after scorching to a historic gun-totape victory in the women’s 60m at the world indoors.

Ahoure, with two previous world indoor silvers to her name, clocked an electric 6.97 seconds down the blue track in Birmingham, the fastest time run over the sprint this season.

Ahoure’s teammate Marie-Josee Ta Lou (7.05sec) took silver by five-thousandeths of a second in a photofinish from Switzerland’s Mujinga Kambundji.

It was not only a first world indoor gold for Ivory Coast but also the first time an African sprinter, male or female, has won the 60m title.

Ahoure, 30, acknowledged that it had been a difficult year personally after the death of her father from cancer.

“I knew he was watching from up there,” she said. “I was talking to him before the race, saying ‘please Dad help me in the race.’ I couldn’t get a gold medal when he was alive. I have so much pent-up up emotion now.”

Jamaica’s double Olympic sprint champion Elaine Thompson was fourth and Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands, the two-time world outdoor 200m champion, fifth in a field that had no representatives

New Zealand’s Tomas Walsh celebrates after winning the men’s shot put final at the 2018 IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championships at the Arena in Birmingham on March

3. (AFP)

from the United States for the first time in indoor history.

“I’m so happy, I’ve trained so hard for this and that medal is for my coach and my team that have trained me so hard,” added Ahoure, who also won double sprint silvers at the 2013 Moscow outdoor worlds.

“The most important thing I knew would be getting out of the blocks and executing my race, focusing on my lane.

“It’s huge to get gold and silver. The Ivory Coast is on top, we’re so happy and hopefully soon we’ll be able to take over the whole podium!”

The local crowd were earlier given a treat when Katarina Johnson-Thompson racked up 4,750 points to win the pentathlon, her first global title.

The Briton clocked 8.36sec in the 60m hurdles, managed a best of 1.91m in the high jump, threw an indoor personal best of 12.68m in the shot put and went out to a lead 6.50m in the long jump.

She kept a cool head in the final event, the 800m, winning in a season’s best of 2:16.63, with Austria’s Ivona Dadic taking silver (4,700 points) and Cuban Yorgelis Rodriguez bronze (4,637).

“It’s been a very long hard day but it’s definitely been worth it. As always in the pentathlon there are highs and lows throughout the day.

I am so happy to have won,” said Johnson-Thompson.

Ivory Coast’s Murielle Ahoure, (foreground right), competes in a semifinal of the women’s 60 meters race at the

World Athletics Indoor Championships in Birmingham, Britain, on March 2. (AP)