The high jump’s very process of elimination effectively whittled down the medal challengers in the women’s pentathlon at the 10th IAAF World Indoor Championships here in the Budapest SportArena this afternoon.
By the end of the second discipline, the pacesetters for medals appeared to be reduced to four, led narrowly by Belgium’s Tia Hellebaut.
Hellebaut showed why she has three times been her national high jump champion, using her event expertise to claw her way up from fifth after the hurdles to a two-event total of 2112pts, just 11 points better than Portugal’s Naide Gomes.
Hellebaut glided apparently effortlessly over the bar for first-time clearances all the way through to 1.88m, at which she required a second attempt. With the competition won at 1.91m, perhaps the pressure was off for Hellebaut, and she could not manage to add to her points score by clearing 1.94m.
Gomes again claimed second place, as she had in today’s opening hurdles race. This time she beat her personal best by 2cm with a first-time clearance of 1.88m, scoring 1080pts for a two-event tally of 2101pts.
But Gomes’s lead over the third and fourth-placed athletes cannot be described as a comfortable cushion.
For Natalya Dobrynska, the former shot putter who has won the Ukrainian pentathlon championship for the past two winters, her 1.82m third-attempt high jump clearance gave her a second personal best of the day.
But the 21-year-old, the youngest pentathlon competitor, goes into her best event lying in fourth place overall behind the winner of the hurdles, Karin Ruckstuhl, of the Netherlands, who like Dobrynska also scored 1003pts for 1.82m, equalling her high jump PB.
For the diminutive Irina Butor, fourth after the morning’s hurdles but the smallest of the eight pentathletes, the high jump presented insurmountable problems once the bar got to 1.79m - some 12cm greater than her own height. The Belarus had to settle for 928pts for her third-attempt clearance at 1.76m, seeing her lose ground to her rivals.
The American entrant, Kim Schiemenz, after last place in the hurdles, was clearly struggling at the opening height of 1.67m, and after just managing to clear on her third attempt, she took no jumps at any other heights.
