By Mitch Phillips
BUDAPEST (Reuters) – As Hungary prepares to host the world athletics championships for the first time all local eyes are locked onto Sunday, the country’s national day, when hammer thrower Bence Halasz has a fighting chance of winning their first-ever world gold medal.
Hungary has won 14 world championship silver and bronze medals – half of them in the hammer – and it was of course the organisers’ prerogative to devise a programme that promotes their best medal hope on a national holiday.
The host nation has also won five Olympic golds in the men’s hammer and, like javelin-mad Helsinki for the first world championships 40 years ago, will give the often overlooked event maximum attention.
“Hungarians love to celebrate the hammer and the men’s event is where we stand the biggest chance of winning, so August 20th (Sunday) could be a beautiful result,” the championships’ chairman Adam Schmidt told a news conference on Friday a day before the action gets underway.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe also said he appreciated the appeal of field events, which have often been squeezed and tweaked in recent years in an attempt to make them more TV-friendly.
“It’s quite an admission from a track runner but the events I’ve most looked forward to in the last few editions have been the field events,” Coe said.
“The men’s shot put final in 2019 was just fantastic to have witnessed so, having the shot final early (on Saturday) is really important in a country where field events are so popular is hugely important, it’s really something.”
Bence Halasz, joint-bronze medallist in 2019 and fifth last year, is the man carrying home hopes on his broad shoulders but he will probably need the day of his life and then some to top the podium and ensure national hero status.
He set a personal best of 80.92 metres in last year’s European Championships but is more than two metres short of that this year and sits eighth in the rankings.
Standing, enormously, in his way is Pole Pawel Fajdek who is seeking a remarkable sixth successive world title to match the record of pole vaulter Sergey Bubka.
The 35,000 capacity stadium will undoubtedly be full for the hammer final and organisers said on Friday they had sold 85% of tickets for the nine-day event with more “going fast”. Tickets have been bought by fans from 106 countries.
“This is the 40th anniversary championships and I’m guessing there are few people who were there in 1983 who would have imagined we’d go from roughly 150 countries and 1300 athletes to more than 200 countries and over 2,000 athletes,” Coe said.
“There have been some outstanding performances this year already, with some amazing records. I think we are in for more outstanding performances and some great head-to-heads.”
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Ken Ferris)
