Budapest World Championships Day 5 Japanese Results

None of the finals on Day 5 of the Budapest World Championships featured any Japanese athletes, but there were good performances in qualifying rounds in both the morning and evening sessions. First up for the day, Tomoya Karasawa didn't turn in one of the good ones, failing to clear the opening height in the men's pole vault qualifying round. Japan's best prospect for an individual medal outside of race walking, Haruka Kitaguchi was the first woman in the javelin throw and one of only seven to clear the auto-qualifying mark of 61.50 m, throwing 63.27 m. Marina Saito managed only 58.95 m for 15th in the first round, just 71 cm short of making the qualifying bracket of twelve.

Men's long jumpers Yuki Hashioka, Hiromichi Yoshida and Shotaro Shiroyama were all off their game in the opening round, Hashioka jumping best with a credible 7.94 m -0.2 m/s but short of the 8.00 m that proved necessary for qualification. Yoshida jumped 7.60 m +1.2 m/s and Shiroyama only 7.46 m -0.8 m/s after clearing 8 m last month at the Asian Championships.

The lone Japanese woman in the 200 m heats, Remi Tsuruta ran 23.49 -0.3 m/s for 6th in Heat 6 and didn't move on to the finals, but the men had better luck. In Heat 1, 2010 World U20 gold medalist Shota Iizuka, now 32, unexpectedly ran his best time since 2016, 20.27 +0.0 m/s for 4th. With six heats still to go it didn't seem like there was much chance Iizuka would survive to make the semifinals on time, but as it played out Heat 1 was the fastest of the day, putting Iizuka through with the fastest time qualifier. Koki Ueyama was 4th in Heat 4, but with only a 20.66 -0.2 m/s he didn't make it.

Heat 5 saw maybe the Japanese performance of the day. Favorites Courtney Lindsey, Rasheed Dwyer and Tarsis Orogot seemed to think they had the top 3 spots locked up and all backed off just before the line. But right behind them Asian Champion Towa Uzawa hammered it right through the line, passing all three for the win by 0.05 in 20.34 -0.2 m/s. American Lindsey and Jamaican Dwyer still auto-qualified, but there was some tense waiting for the Ugandan Argot to see if his 20.44 was enough to get him through. Which it ended up being.

In the evening session, neither of the Japanese women in the triple jump made the semifinals, Mariko Morimoto 15th in Group A at 13.64 m -0.3 m/s and Maoko Takashima 17th in Group B at 13.34 m -0.3 m/s. In the only other event with Japanese athletes, women's 5000 m NR holder Ririka Hironaka doubled back from taking 7th in the 10000 m final with a season best 15:11.16 for 12th in Heat 1, missing the cutoff for the final by 6 seconds. Former Meijo University star Yuma Yamamoto was last in Heat 1 in 16:05.57. In Heat 2, Nozomi Tanaka doubled from finishing last in the 1500 m semifinals to take 6th in Heat 2, breaking Hironaka's NR with a 14:37.98 and making the final. The final takes place Sunday night.

Complete Day 5 results here.

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How it Happened

Ancient History I went to Wesleyan University, where the legend of four-time Boston Marathon champ and Wes alum Bill Rodgers hung heavy over the cross-country team. Inspired by Koichi Morishita and Young-Cho Hwang’s duel at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics I ran my first marathon in 1993, qualifying for Boston ’94 where Bill was kind enough to sign a star-struck 20-year-old me’s bib number at the expo. Three years later I moved to Japan for grad school, and through a long string of coincidences I came across a teenaged kid named Yuki Kawauchi down at my neighborhood track. I never imagined he’d become what he is, but right from the start there was just something different about him. After his 2:08:37 breakthrough at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon he called me up and asked me to help him get into races abroad. He’d finished 3rd on the brutal downhill Sixth Stage at the Hakone Ekiden, and given how he’d run the hills in the last 6 km at Tokyo ’11 I thought he’d do well at Boston or New York. “I...

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