Translated material
Finnish Wimbledon
Rain disrupted athletes' starts at the World Championships
A heavy downpour that erupted in the skies of the Finnish capital radically disrupted the schedule of starts in the evening program of the fourth day of the World Athletics Championships. The final discus competition with the participation of Russian Natalya Sadova, who did not have time to make her first throw before the rain, was interrupted just before it began. The girls' 100m hurdles preliminary races also had to be postponed. The decathletes, who entered the high jump sector early in the afternoon, were just a few minutes short of completing their fourth event.At 20.15 local time, the championship panel of judges, in order not to languish the athletes waiting for good weather, announced the postponement of discus throwing, men's triple jump and hurdles to the next day. It's hard to even remember when something like this happened at the World Championships. An analogy with the Wimbledon tennis tournament involuntarily suggests itself, where rain and postponements of matches are an everyday occurrence.
Meanwhile, the Russian national team continues to be plagued by an epidemic of injuries. So far, its victims are exclusively girls competing in jumping disciplines. Following Elena Slesarenko (height) and Tatyana Lebedeva (triple), Irina Simagina (length) was forced to stop the fight early. The winner of the season's best result in the world withdrew from the competition due to a leg injury. In today's final, Russia will be represented by two people - Tatyana Kotova and Oksana Udmurtova.
According to experts, such a high injury rate is explained by the excessive rigidity of the synthetic surface laid by the tournament organizers in the jumping sectors. Because of this, the American team also suffered. Famous for always wearing a hockey helmet, Stars and Stripes poleman Toby Stevenson also did not make a single attempt in yesterday's qualifying. Fortunately, our Igor Pavlov and Pavel Gerasimov easily qualified for the final, which will take place tomorrow.
The day before, on Monday late in the evening, Swede Kaisa Bergqvist, already a gold medal winner, unsuccessfully stormed the bar three times at the height of a new world record - 2 m 10 cm. Having started her performances with 1.85, the Scandinavian then achieved five of the six subsequent milestones, including 2, 02, she took it on the first try, and she only cleared the bar, set at a height of two meters exactly, on the second jump. Bergqvist has not yet been able to fulfill her desire to surpass the achievement of Bulgarian Stefka Kostadinova, set 18 years ago, by one centimeter. But judging by the technique of performing jumps, she is in such optimal shape that in the foreseeable future she is able to enter her name into the table of records.
Kaisa made her debut at the World Championships back in 1975 in her homeland in Gothenburg, but then the 19-year-old athlete could not even qualify, jumping 1.90. In Athens 1997, the Swede was already fifth; she rose another step up at the next world forum in Seville, Spain. Then Kaisa had a kind of “bronze age” - third places in the Olympic Sydney, at the 2001 and 2003 planetary championships in Edmonton and Paris. And finally, the long-awaited “gold”.
In the women's 100m final, Frenchwoman Christine Arron, who won all three stages of the Golden League this season, suffered a sensational defeat. Arron, together with Tatyana Lebedeva, is claiming to share the “jackpot” of these competitions - an amount of $ 1 million, but excessive enthusiasm for commercial starts certainly influenced the Frenchwoman’s result in Helsinki. As for the new champion, 22-year-old American Lauren Williams, she became the winner, dropping three hundredths of a second from her “silver” result at the Olympics in Greece.