Kenya's Wanyonyi holds off Sedjati for world 800m gold / Photo: Ben STANSALL - AFP
Kenya's Wanyonyi holds off Sedjati for world 800m gold
Kenya's Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi added the world crown to his laurels with a hard-fought victory in the men's 800 metres on Saturday.
Wanyonyi timed a championship record of 1min 41.86sec for gold in Tokyo, just four hundredths of a second ahead of Algeria's fast-finishing Djamel Sedjati.
Defending champion Marco Arop of Canada had to settle for bronze in 1:41.95 in a reshuffle of the podium places with Sedjati from last year's Paris Olympics.
The 21-year-old Wanyonyi is a master of gun-to-tape tactics and he duly raced straight into the lead, Arop immediately on his shoulder.
The pair briefly bumped shoulders before the Kenyan moved away, clocking a rapid 49.27sec through the opening 400 metres.
Wanyonyi failed to drop the chasing pack down the far straight, however, and coming off the bend, the packed crowd at Tokyo's National Stadium rose to their feet as the field spread ready for all-out attack.
Arop made his move alongside Wanyonyi.
And then from a distant sixth place came Sedjati, who strained every sinew to pull up with the leading pair before Wanyonyi responded with a final, decisive kick of his own to ensure victory by the closest of margins.
Ireland's Cian McPhillips, the first Irish athlete to run a 800m final at a world championships, was fourth in 1:42.15 as all eight athletes posted sub-1:43 times in a race of the highest quality.
Never in doubt, however, was David Rudisha's world record set when the Kenyan won the London Olympics in 2012.
The double Olympic champion, also twice a gold medallist at world championships, was an interested spectator in the stadium and is a close friend of Wanyonyi's.
The 36-year-old was sat alongside World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, himself a two-time Olympic silver medallist over the two-lap race and whose best of 1:41.73 still puts him joint eighth on the all-time list.
V.Hofbauer--NWT
