- Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi smashes record to win first world 800m title.
- Wanyonyi beat Algeria’s Djamel Sedjati and Canada’s Marco Arop.
- Wanyonyi timed a championship record of 1min 41.86sec for gold in Tokyo, just four hundredths of a second ahead of Sedjati.
Kenya’s Emmanuel Wanyonyi claimed his first world 800 meter gold medal after clocking 1:41.86 to win in the Tokyo World Athletics Championships 2025.
Wanyonyi, who claimed silver in the Budapest World Championships in 2023, showed incredible endurance as he led from gun to tape to claim gold ahead of Algeria’s Djamel Sedjati and Canada’s Marco Arop.
The 21-year-old Wanyonyi is a master of gun-to-tape tactics and he duly raced straight into the lead, Arop immediately on his shoulder.
The pair briefly bumped shoulders before the Kenyan moved away, clocking a rapid 49.27sec through the opening 400 metres.
Wanyonyi failed to drop the chasing pack down the far straight, however, and coming off the bend, the packed crowd at Tokyo’s National Stadium rose to their feet as the field spread ready for all-out attack.
Arop made his move alongside Wanyonyi.
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And then from a distant sixth place came Sedjati, who strained every sinew to pull up with the leading pair before Wanyonyi responded with a final, decisive kick of his own to ensure victory by the closest of margins.
Ireland’s Cian McPhillips, the first Irish athlete to run an 800m final at a world championship, was fourth in 1:42.15 as all eight athletes posted sub-1:43 times in a race of the highest quality.
Never in doubt, however, was David Rudisha’s world record set when the Kenyan won the London Olympics in 2012.
The double Olympic champion, also twice a gold medallist at world championships, was an interested spectator in the stadium and is a close friend of Wanyonyi’s.
The 36-year-old was sat alongside World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, himself a two-time Olympic silver medallist over the two-lap race and whose best of 1:41.73 still puts him joint eighth on the all-time list.
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