The opening semi-final was panning out as expected until Werro suddenly stumbled and fell face first onto the track with just under 140m left to go.<\/p>\n
“It was a hard hit on the floor. These tracks are incredibly hard, especially when they’ve been sun-baked,” former Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford said on BBC TV.<\/p>\n
“It really was a difficult thing to watch, and you’re just hoping at that point [that] there’s no serious injury.”<\/p>\n
Werro appeared to be in some discomfort, rolling onto her side and clutching her chest before getting back up and finishing the race at a slow jog.<\/p>\n
Paula Radcliffe, a former women’s marathon world record holder, said: “Athletes know if that happens and you go down, you have to get up and finish. <\/p>\n
“That is the only criteria that you’re going to make it through. If you don’t do that, you have no chance of being advanced through to that final. <\/p>\n
“You could see she was not comfortable.”<\/p>\n
However, there was considerable confusion over whether Werro had tripped herself or been impeded by another athlete.<\/p>\n
Rutherford believed Werro had “kicked her own leg”, while former men’s 1500m world champion Steve Cram said she had “tripped herself”.<\/p>\n
Werro herself did not know, telling BBC TV: “I was feeling great but unfortunately I don’t know, something happened and then I was on the ground.”<\/p>\n
A closer look at the footage showed that Bourgoin, who had been on Werro’s shoulder for much of the race, disrupted the Swiss athlete’s rhythm with a slight touch to her foot with her left hand.<\/p>\n
“The question is whether Werro is OK – it was a really hard fall,” Cram said.<\/p>\n
“But we are getting the final we wanted. That’s one way to look at it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The opening semi-final was panning out as expected until Werro suddenly stumbled and fell face first onto the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-592098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}