japan running news

Day two of the 21st U20 Asian Athletics Championships in Dubai was capped with Japan's first gold medal of the games. Less than a month into his first year at 2024 Hakone Ekiden champ Aoyama Gakuin University , sub-13:30 high schooler Sota Orita fought off multiple surges from Indian duo Gaurav Bhaskar Bhosale and Vinod Singh to take 5000 m gold in 14:08.71 with 56-second last lap and big a move on the last curve. His new AGU teammate Kaito Iida also finished strong for bronze, coming up just short of silver in 14:09.63. Miku Yanagawa (Gunma T&F Assoc.) added another gold medal to the count in the women's pole vault, winning at 3.85 m on her first attempt, with silver and bronze medalists Anna Cherkashina of Kazakhstan and Melabessy Andriani of Indonesia only going as high as 3.60 m. Nono Tsuneishi (Fukuoka Univ.) won silver in the women's long jump, jumping 6.21 (+0.7) on her 3rd attempt. Gold medalist Nagaraj Pavana also dropped her biggest jump in the third...

The second day of U20 Asian Championships took place June 5 in Yecheon, South Korea. In the men's triple jump, Minato Miyao (Toyo Univ.) set a new U20 NR of 16.38 m to win the gold medal. The previous U20 record of 16.35 m had stood for 20 years. Miyao began his first year at Toyo in April after graduating from Kyoto's Rakunan H.S. Last summer he took 2nd at the Tokushima National High School Championships, then followed up in November with a 16.13 m high school NR jump at the Kyoto Private Schools Championships. Despite the changes to his lifestyle that came with going to college, at April's Oda Memorial Meet Miyao placed 5th overall and 3rd among Japanese men with a jump of 15.76 m +0.7 m/s. At May's Kanto Regionals he won at 16.12 m +2.8 m/s. At the U20 Asian Championships, Miyao's first jump was 16.08 m into a 2.7 m/s headwind. He duplicated that distance on his fourth attempt and was in the top position at the end of the fifth round. A Chinese athlete moved ...

Japan finally got onto the medal board at the Cali 22 World U20 Championships with medal-winning performances in two of the country's strongest events bookending the fifth day of the meet and one more unexpected one to punctuate them. In the day's first event, Ai Oyama and Ayane Yanai took silver and bronze in the women's 10000 m race walk. It almost literally couldn't have been closer up front, with Mexican Karla Ximena Serrano beating Oyama by just 0.09 to take gold in a PB 46:24.35. Yanai was all alone in the bronze position in 46:43.07, almost a minute ahead of 4th-placer Olivia Sandery of Australia. The Japanese men were expected to medal in the day's last event, the 4x100 m relay where they had led the qualifying round. First three runners Kowa Ikeshita , Hiroto Fujiwara and Shunki Tateno lacked the same kind of spark in the final, and when anchor Hiroki Yanagita took the baton he was back in a group around 4th~6th. But with a brilliant run he ran down...

The same day most of Japan's team from the Oregon 22 World Championships made it back home, the Cali 22 World U20 Championships team took off from Tokyo ahead of next week's meet. 9 women representing 5 universities and 3 high schools across 6 events and 25 men from 17 universities and 3 high schools across 15 events are entered . But if the numbers in Eugene were anything to go by it's likely the number of them who make it to the starting line will be smaller.  The women are surprisingly absent from the 3000 m, usually an area of strength for them, but the women's team does include Moe Matsuoka (Chuo Univ.), 4th-fastest U20 worldwide in the 400 mH this year, 10000 mRW top 2-ranked Ai Oyama (Kagoshima Joshi H.S.) and Ayane Yanai (Ritsumeikan Univ.), and 2022 worldwide #5 and #6 Momoko Tsuji (Kyushu Kyoritsu Univ.) and Aoi Murakami (Nittai Univ.) in the javelin throw. Notable names among the men's entries include Oregon 4x100 m team member and worldwide #6 jun...