Three New Zealanders lined up at the Wanda Diamond League final in Brussels over the weekend, and the one with the least experience of the occasion finished highest of them all.
Pole vaulter Imogen Ayris placed fifth in her first appearance at the season showpiece, with a best clearance of 4.55 metres. Sprinter Zoe Hobbs was sixth in the women’s 100 metres in 11.14 seconds, and shot putter Tom Walsh was sixth with a best of 21.67 metres. Athletics New Zealand confirmed the results on Sunday, after two nights of competition at the King Baudouin Stadium on Friday 4 and Saturday 5 September.
The final is the end point of a season that runs across 14 meetings on four continents. Athletes collect points at each stop and only the leading few in each discipline carry enough to reach Brussels. Winners take home the Diamond Trophy and USD 30,000, prize money is paid down to ninth place, and a win also books automatic entry to the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest. Simply qualifying puts an athlete in the top handful in the world for the year, which is why all three New Zealanders were there at all.
Ayris, who is 25 and grew up in Auckland, has had the best season of her career. She took a shared bronze at the world indoor championships in ToruΕ in March, went to 4.81 metres for a personal best at the Paavo Nurmi Games in Finland in June, and won bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July, four years after taking bronze in Birmingham on a fractured foot. World Athletics went into the Brussels final noting that Ayris was one of three vaulters in the field who had cleared a higher height this season than world number one Katie Moon.
The competition itself did not run her way. Her 4.55 metres was well short of what she has managed elsewhere this year, and the event was won by 21 year old American Hana Moll, who cleared all five of her earlier heights at the first attempt before needing three goes at a personal best 4.91 metres. Moll has now won in Lausanne, Zurich and Brussels in the space of a fortnight. Fifth in that company, on a night when the bar kept going up, is still the best Diamond League final result of Ayris’s career.
Hobbs arrived in Brussels as the fastest New Zealand woman in history and the reigning Commonwealth 100 metres champion. She won that title in Glasgow on 28 July in 10.93 seconds, a national and Oceania record, and the first sprint medal a New Zealander had won at the Games since Doreen Porter-Shann took silver in the 100 yards in 1962. “It makes me a little bit emotional,” Hobbs said after that race. “I’ve just been doing this for so long now. It’s not a traditional pathway in New Zealand for athletics. I don’t think many people would have thought that I could walk away with a gold medal, other than my team.”
In Brussels she was a fraction off that level and the field was brutal. Jamaica’s Tina Clayton won in 10.93, the only woman under 11 seconds, ahead of European champion Amy Hunt in 11.06 and Sha’Carri Richardson in 11.07. Patrizia van der Weken and Jonielle Smith both stopped the clock at 11.08. Hobbs was sixth in 11.14, six hundredths of a second away from fourth place in a race where the entire field behind the winner was covered by less than a tenth. Hunt, who finished second, is the sprinter Hobbs beat to gold in Glasgow.
Walsh finished his year in the ring with the same feeling that has followed him around all season. The Timaru thrower, world champion in 2017, twice an Olympic bronze medallist and world indoor champion again in ToruΕ in March, threw 21.67 metres for sixth. His outdoor best of 22.90 metres, set in Doha in 2019, still stands as the Oceania record and puts him among the best throwers the event has ever had.
“I know I had more on the tank,” Walsh said in the Athletics New Zealand release. “It kind of probably sums my season up. Just a little bit off. We’re not talking much off, but just enough to be, you know, out of the mix.”
He was not the only one left behind by what happened in the circle. Jamaica’s Rajindra Campbell won with 23.08 metres, a personal best, a Jamaican record and a meeting record all at once. According to the Diamond League report on the night, Campbell’s previous best was 22.59 metres set in Brescia only a week earlier, and his winning throw moved him to fourth on the world all time list while adding 34 centimetres to the world lead. Walsh was competing against a man having the single best night of his life.
The season is not quite over. Ayris and Hobbs are both heading to Budapest for the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship from 11 to 13 September, a new invitational with small fields, three sessions of competition and a prize pool of USD 10 million, including USD 150,000 for each individual winner. Athletics New Zealand said the full New Zealand start lists would be confirmed on Monday. Walsh has closed out his season.
Judged on medals, a fifth and two sixths reads like a quiet weekend. Judged on what it takes to get into a Diamond League final at all, it is three New Zealanders standing among the best dozen or so people on the planet in their events, in the last week of a long northern summer, a long way from home. Ayris has never been better placed going into a championship. Hobbs has a Commonwealth title and a national record that will take some beating. Walsh, at 34, is still throwing within a metre and a bit of a mark that has stood for seven years.
Have you been following the New Zealand athletes on the European circuit this season, and who are you backing in Budapest next weekend? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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