What a discus final at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest. Laulauga Tausaga from the USA sensationally won gold. Only silver remained for Olympic champion Valarie Allman. The German discus trio around Kristin Pudenz in sixth place clearly missed out on medals.
It was all pointing to a victory for big favorite Allman as Tausaga stepped into the ring for her fifth try. 69.49m! The 25-year-old discus thrower, born in Honolulu (Hawaii), pulverized her personal best by a good four meters. Allman was just as shocked as Tausaga himself and couldn’t counter. The Olympic champion “only” stayed silver with a really strong jump of 69.23 m. The Chinese Feng Bin (68.20), who had triumphed in Eugene, secured bronze.
In this equally exciting and high-class final, the DLV trio could not quite keep up. Pudenz, who came second at the Olympics, finished sixth as the best German with 65.96 m – the Potsdam athlete was 2.24 m short of the bronze medal. Like Pudenz, Shanice Craft (Halle an der Saale) made it into the final battle of the top eight, with 65.47 m she was seventh. Claudine Vita (Neubrandenburg/63.19), who was third at the European Championships, took tenth place.
Pudenz: “Annoying at first”
“It’s annoying at first. I came to fight for the medals. I couldn’t do that at all today,” said Pudenz, who “liked to show more” and would have had to throw a best performance for a medal: “That wouldn’t have been impossible today.”
We are still among the best in the world and we can be proud of that.
Pudenz paid tribute to the surprise winner Tausaga: “To perform like that in the World Cup final, hats off.” The 30-year-old had mixed feelings about her competition. “You have to make sixth and seventh place in the world first, but of course it’s the medals that we all want. Solid isn’t enough at this level.”
The three DLV athletes had high hopes for a medal. Before the title fights in Hungary, the trio was among the seven best throwers in the world. When it came down to it in Budapest, Pudenz and Co. could no longer follow the discus exchange of blows of the world elite.