Hammer Throw Final 2005 Press Conference (© IAAF)
Szombathely, Hungary Tomorrow, Saturday 3 September, the top-ranking Hammer Throw exponents of 2005 will be competing here for the honours of the World Athletics Final in this specialist discipline.
For three years the Hungarian city of Szombathely has played host to the Hammer Throw Final of the World Athletics Final as the Stade Louis II in Monaco, which is the venue for the rest of the competition cannot stage this discipline due to technical constraints.
With the World Athletics Final moving to a new home in Stuttgart, Germany, next year, tomorrow’s Final here will be the ultimate staging of the event in Hungary and the press conference on the eve of the event looked back at the impact that the Hammer Throw Final has had on Szombathely, which is recognized as a real centre of excellence for this speciality.
For Tibor Gecsek, who heads the local organizing committee and is also the director of the IAAF’s Accredited Training Centre in Szombathely, it has been a rich experience: “It has been an honour for us to stage the Hammer Throw Final here. Szombathely has a deep tradition in the Hammer Throw and it has been wonderful to have some of the world’s greatest throwers competing here.”
The organisers do not intend the experience to end with tomorrow’s competition either. Gecsek says, “We would like in the future to organise a new competition here every year, a sort of festival of Hammer Throw, which we envisage as a one day competition that could be the ‘Golden Hammer’ and that would once again enable us to have here the best throwers in the world.”
The top eight men and seven of the top 8 women hammer throwers will line up in Szombathely tomorrow, with just China’s Wenxiu Zhang (ranked 6th in the world in 2005) missing from the competition as she is competing in the Asian Championships. Hungary’s youth chamion Noemi Nemeth has exceptionally been added to the women’s competition.
With the conditions promising to be ideal: good weather and temperatures in the high twenties Centigrade, we can expect some good performances, with the rankings leaders attempting to repeat or better their performances in the recent World Championships in Helsinki and even possible world records with the current women’s world record holder Tatyana Lysenko from Russia on good form and Belarusian World champion Ivan Tikhon having thrown just one centimetre short of the 19-year-old record of Russia’s Yuriy Sedykh already this season and currently throwing consistently over 80 metres.
Sean Wallace-Jones for the IAAF
