Walsh: Win lifts my mood
Tom Walsh’s apparel sponsor couldn’t have worse timing. Global sportswear giant Nike have dropped the Kiwi shot put colossus from their stable right when he appears to have turned the corner on his road to Tokyo.
Walsh snapped a run of four straight defeats to Kiwi rival Jacko Gill in Auckland on Saturday night when he threw a season’s best 21.60 metres to claim victory in the men’s shot at the Sir Graeme Douglas International meet.
The 28-year-old Christchurch-based Timaru athlete, who has been struggling mentally with the pared-back Covid landscape in his sport, had to come up clutch in the later rounds of the competition, after Gill had set the early pace with a second-round throw of 21.05m, and then backed it up with a fifth-round 21.44m.
But the three-time world champion and Olympic bronze medallist responded when it mattered, blasting out a fifth-round 21.6m to claim a victory that was as much of a relief as it was a much-needed jolt of confidence.
It was the furthest Walsh has thrown since his 21.62 in Hastings last September and was another step in the right direction after a domestic campaign that had unleashed best tosses of 20.78, 20.79, 21.46 and 21.45, respectively.
Even more important for Walsh was his third-round bomb that he just fouled. That one went out past the 22-metre mark (a distance he hasn’t bettered in competition since his remarkable 22.90m for third at the 2019 world champs in Doha) and left him reflecting on a satisfying night’s competition all-round in Auckland.
‘‘The whole six throws, I didn’t quite stitch them together the way I wanted to in terms of freedom. But the one thing I was really happy with was the aggression in the competition – I stayed pretty positive in myself throughout,’’ he said, giving his series a 6.5 or 7 out of 10 grade.
‘‘I’ve been beating myself up a lot lately, and that was a big step for me to stay positive and stay in the fight and keep telling myself, ‘I can do this; I have done this; I will do this again’. ‘‘When I’m throwing well, I’m confident, and that’s something that’s been missing lately.’’
The burly Kiwi is neither used to being bested domestically, nor throwing so modestly at this time of the year, and the last few months have been testing for him as he’s searched for a lift in level heading towards the Tokyo Olympics where he’s desperate to upgrade his bronze from Rio in 2016.