Mykolas Alekna managed a legal throw, but Denny slid on the circle and fell as the heavens opened, leading to a cessation in the competition for two hours.<\/p>\n
“He is pissed off,” Nina Kennedy said, as Denny flung the discus away.<\/p>\n
“This isn’t what elite sport is about.”<\/p>\n
The competition was restarted after the conclusion of all the other events and the closing ceremony, after consultation with the athletes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Matt Denny managed two no throws in his last two attempts. (Getty Images: Michael Steele)<\/p>\n
“The vast majority of discus athletes want the competition to take place tonight,” a World Athletics statement read.<\/p>\n
“Every effort will be made to keep the circle and surrounding area dry and the competition will commence.<\/p>\n
“The athletes have been offered the opportunity to wear any shoes they feel are safe.<\/p>\n
“We thank all teams for their cooperation, and wish all discus athletes the best of luck under very difficult conditions.”<\/p>\n
Wearing a variety of different footwear \u2014 Denny taped his standing foot, others wore trainers and German Mika Sosna went into the cage in his socks in a bid to find some grip \u2014 the athletes resumed, with volunteers dabbing at the torrent of water with towels.<\/p>\n
But the problems remained.<\/p>\n
“I’m finding this really hard to watch,” Tamsyn Manou said on SBS as competitors slipped and slid across the circle.<\/p>\n
“Someone could get really hurt.”<\/p>\n
Austrian thrower Lukas Wei\u00dfhaidinger slipped and fell badly in the circle, as did Mario D\u00edaz of Cuba.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lukas Wei\u00dfhaidinger could have seriously injured himself when he fell. (Getty Images: Cameron Spencer)<\/p>\n
It clearly had an impact, with just three athletes throwing further than they did in qualifying in dry conditions on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
“I’ve watched track and field for my whole life, and I’ve never seen as many falls as this night,” Kennedy said on Nine.<\/p>\n
“This is just getting dangerous and silly at this point.”<\/p>\n
Out of 52 attempts in the final, a whopping 50 per cent were fouled, with Henrik Janseen failing to record a single distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This is not a fair competition,” veteran commentator Bruce McAveny said on SBS.<\/p>\n
“It has been rushed.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Conditions were attrocious. (Getty Images: Michael Steele)<\/p>\n
Denny said he felt the competition should have been delayed to the next day.<\/p>\n
“I just said if there’s an option to throw tomorrow, I don’t care if there’s 100,000 people or zero people, like we did zero people for the Olympics in ’21,\u201d Denny said.<\/p>\n
“But I understand that people have flights, people have things booked, people are ready to go.<\/p>\n
“It’s just really hard, really emotional and disappointing.”<\/p>\n
Daniel St\u00e5hl won the competition with his final throw, launching the discus 70.47m to beat Mykolas Alekna (67.84m).<\/p>\n
“This was my first rainy championships ever,” St\u00e5hl said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I tried to focus today as much as possible, focus on not giving up and just staying positive. Sometimes things like this happen. There are delays, the competition takes time. I just tried to reboot my energy.<\/p>\n
“If I thought I was going to make a fault, I would make it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“You have to have this different mentality \u2014 if it’s raining, you have to be ready for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Today wasn’t slippery for me at all because I have really good shoes.”<\/p>\n
Alenka, meanwhile, said he “never imagined that the conditions were going to be like that.”<\/p>\n
Alex Rose finished in bronze medal position with 66.96m, winning Samoa it’s first ever world championship medal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matt Denny finished in an agonising fourth place in a farcical discus final at the World Athletics Championships…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,105867,6462,105866,85,95194,81437],"class_list":["post-159937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-discus","tag-live-updates","tag-matt-denny","tag-sports","tag-tokyo-2025","tag-world-athletics-championships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}