It was fast again. It was close again. It was him again. Kenya’s Emmanuel Wanyonyi won the gold medal in the men’s 800m at the World Athletics Championships Tokyo ‘25 in a championships record of 1:41.86.
With a gun-to-tape strategy – similar to the one he used last year while winning the Olympic title in Paris – he managed to hold off a fierce challenge from Canada’s defending champion Marco Arop and a fast-finishing Djamel Sedjati of Algeria.
In complete contrast to Wednesday’s 1500m race, when many podium contenders did not make it to the final, all the main favourites were behind the start line at the final of the two-lap race. The winning trio topped this season’s rankings and shared the podium at last year’s Games, when Arop placed second and Sedjati third. Here in Tokyo two of them reversed roles: Sedjati claimed silver in 1:41.90, while Arop took bronze in 1:41.95.
NOTHING FOR GRANTED “I didn’t take this race for granted. I wanted to do everything to secure the gold. Now I need to defend this title. I want to be a double world champion. Maybe I will start to think about the world record too,” Wanyonyi said after the race.
At the twentieth edition of the World Championships, he won the eighth 800m title for Kenya. He qualified for the final in second place in his semi-final heat; after a relatively slow first lap, he was overtaken by Spain’s Mohamed Attaoui, known for his strong finishing kick.
In the final, the Kenyan 21-year-old set a fast pace from the start, running the first lap in 49.26 – two hundredths of a second faster than his fellow countryman David Rudisha did in the Olympic final in London thirteen years ago, when he set a world record of 1:40.91.
WITH PRESIDENT COE Rudisha watched his successor’s triumph live at the Japan National Stadium, in the company of World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who held the 800m world record from 1979 to 1997. “I met Rudisha yesterday. He told me just to take a rest and focus, and everything is possible,” said Wanyonyi, commenting on his own race strategy. “The race was fast and hard. I knew it was going to be like this. I prepared myself mentally for it. I wanted to run a fast race, that’s why I went to the lead. I wanted to run my personal best here and I am happy to walk away with the championship record. I knew lactic acid was going to hit me.”
His fast pace led to one of the fastest 800m races in history. It was the first time that eight men have ever dipped under 1:43 in a single race. Cian McPhillips lowered his Irish record by more than a second to finish fourth in 1:42.15, Attaoui, who attacked the podium in the last bend, finished fifth. Great Britain’s Max Burgin set his personal best of 1:42.29, while Jamaica’s Navasky Anderson produced a national record of 1:42.76.
“It was a very tactical race. Everything happened the way I planned, except the gold medal. But I’m very happy and satisfied with this silver,” said Sedjati, sending a message to his teammate Mohamed Triki, who finished fourth in the triple jump: “Don’t cry, believe in yourself, you deserve better than this. I dedicate my medal to you.”
Third-placed Arop said he does not know if he would have changed anything tactically. “I figured by going out fast it would be harder for everyone to kick at the end. I wanted to stay in the front and stay strong the whole way. Four medals in the last four major global championships is the kind of consistency we strive for.”—-
Lucijan Zalokar (Slovenja) is part of the Media Academy, an initiative of World Athletics in partnership with AIPS
