Anita Wlodarczyk celebrates winning the hammer at the IAAF World Championships Beijing 2015 (© Getty Images)
For the second time in the history of the IAAF Hammer Throw Challenge, Poland’s world champions Anita Wlodarczyk and Pawel Fajdek topped the end-of-year standings.
The scoring system takes each athlete’s three best marks from the series and equates metres to points. Prize money is awarded to the top 12 finishers at the end of the challenge. The athlete with the highest score wins US $30,000.
Wlodarczyk’s top two performances in the series were achieved in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium. She won the world title with 80.85m, having thrown 77.73m earlier in the season in the Chinese capital. Added to her 76.70m throw from Szczecin at the beginning of August, the 29-year-old amassed 235.28 points, bettering her own record score of 233.83 from 2013.
Wlodarczyk also broke the world record in August with 81.08m, but the competition in Cetniewo was not part of the IAAF Hammer Throw Challenge.
For the second year in succession, Germany’s Betty Heidler placed second overall in the challenge standings. She finished just 0.08 points ahead of Martina Hrasnova of the Slovak Republic.
Fajdek regained the title he won in 2013. Like Wlodarczyk, Fajdek’s winning total was the best ever in the six-year history of the series.
His 248.01 tally comprised marks of 83.93m in Szczecin, 83.12m in Szekesfehervar and 80.96m last weekend in Rieti.
A distant second with 236.20 points, Tajikistan’s Dilshod Nazarov finished second overall in this year’s challenge, improving one place on his position from last year.
Olympic champion and 2014 challenge winner Krisztian Pars – the only man in the world this season to beat Fajdek – was third this year, scoring 234.75.
IAAF
