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Murali Sreeshankar flops in final, Wang snatches gold with last leap
India’s wait of a first men’s medal at the athletics world championships continued after the jumper could not breach even 8 metres in the final at Eugene on Saturday (US time)
Murali Sreeshankar's quest for a historic World Championships medal ended with a whimper on a benign Eugene evening on Saturday (US time) after the long jumper produced a below-par 7.96m to finish seventh in the 12-man final.
China's Jianan Wang snatched the gold from Greek Olympic champion Miltiadis Tentoglou (8.32m) with his last jump—8.36m—while season leader Simon Ehammer's 8.16m won him the bronze. Olympic bronze medallist Maykel Masso was fourth with a best of 8.15m. Six finalists, or half the field, touched 8m.
Sreeshankar, the first Indian man to qualify for the Worlds final and with a personal best of 8.36m, started his series with 7.96m but fouled his next two efforts. A 7.89m in his fourth attempt was followed by another foul before the 23-year-old closed out with 7.83m. He had cleared 8 metres in the qualifying round.
Indian long jumpers have faced questions over their repeated underwhelming performances in major competitions after producing world class jumps at home or in minor events. That scrutiny will not go away after the Worlds after Mohammed Anees Yahiya and Jeswin Aldrin were both eliminated in the qualifying round on Friday.
This was a second successive big-ticket final for Sreeshankar, who also finished seventh at the World Indoors this year after not clearing 8m. He was also seventh after the qualifying stage.
Sreeshankar jointly holds the second best jump of the season (8.36m), but not for the first time in his career, came unstuck on the big stage. He failed to make the final at the 2019 Worlds in Doha as well as last year's Tokyo Olympics. A bunch of 8m-plus leaps this season had hinted at the possibility of his bucking the trend.
Sreeshankar’s failure means woman long jumper Anju Bobby George remains the only Indian athlete to win a medal at the Worlds, at Paris in 2003.
There was no performance pressure from the consistent Tentoglou, who dominated till the penultimate jump. The Greek, hoping to extend his eight-event unbeaten run with a first Worlds gold (outdoor), started with a foul but produced a sterling series of jumps to surge ahead. His first five attempts were foul, 8.30m, 8.29m, 8.34m, and 8.32m. With the next best until then being only 8.16m, the win seemed a formality.
Then came the twist. China's Wang, fifth at that point, began his run-up determined to improve on a third place at the 2015 Worlds in Beijing. A perfect run-up and a clinical leap saw him go past Tentoglou’s best mark. That became apparent the moment Wang landed. He ran around in celebration as the screen flashed 8.36m, two centimeters better that the Greek.
Wang's giant leap had a ripple effect on the standing. Tentoglou’s four legal jumps were all ahead of the rest of the field. But he was pushed to second and Ehammer to third.
Needing to jump at least 8.36m to secure the only gold missing from his cabinet, the 24-year-old Tentoglou could register only 8.20m. It was still four centimetres clear of Ehammer’s best try, but a series that had promised victory was good enough only for silver.
