GB fail to win gold amid worst return for 20 years

For the first time in 22 years, Great Britain and Northern Ireland failed to capture a gold medal at the World Athletics Championships as they recorded their lowest overall result since 2005.

The GB won only five to eight medals overall as they came close to completing the nine-day contest.

That was on par with their 2019 total in Doha, compared to Helsinki’s three-year-old victory less than 20 years ago.

The women’s 4x100m relay quartet, who won Olympic silver last year, finished two-tenths of a second off the podium, which gave the team their final medal opportunity in Japan.

That confirmed that for the first time since Paris in 2003, Great Britain would not be able to claim a relay medal of any color.

The team’s final attempt to finish without a gold was also that.

The British team, which had 64 members, placed 21st overall in the medal standings.

The team finished seventh at the previous World Championships two years ago after capturing their best haul of 10 medals.

They also brought home five bronze medals, three silver, and two gold on that occasion.

With ten gold medals in athletics at Paris 2024, they also won Britain’s best medal at an Olympic event in 40 years.

Great Britain’s head coach Paula Dunn said: “Definitely a mixed bag.” Good, which I’m pleased to see, and some opportunities that were missed.

Amy Hunt won her first global individual medal with silver in the women’s 200m on day five of the medal stand before Jake Wightman’s men’s 1500m silver medalist Jake Wightman put an end to the GB’s medal wait in Tokyo.

In the dramatic heptathlon finale on Saturday, Katarina Johnson-Thompson and I shared bronze.

Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson and Georgia Hunter Bell won the women’s 800m final while Lilian Odira from Kenya snubbed their stunning one-two.

Josh Kerr, the current 1500m champion, Matt Hudson-Smith, the world 400m silver medalist, and Molly Caudery, the 2024 indoor pole vault champion, all suffered injuries.

Emile Cairess, a marathon runner, was unable to complete the men’s marathon in another location because of the oppressive humidity and high temperatures.

The athletes’ conditions and the distance between the warm-up facilities and the stadium have both been brought up during the championships.

Throughout the majority of the championships, temperatures above 30C were accompanied by stifling humidity.

After finishing fourth at the Paris Olympics last summer, Cairess, a medal hopeful, claimed that when he dropped out of the men’s marathon with only three of the 26.2 miles remaining, he “just got too hot.”

Dunn cited the fact that “surprised us” in particular.

The humidity was so high that one day you could see it in the sky because we knew it would be hot and humid.

“We attempted to prepare as much for the heat as possible, but it is incredibly challenging to do so. We used a cooling strategy and an ice strategy.

Following complaints from athletes like World Champion Hodgkinson, World Athletics president Lord Coe criticized the location of the warm-up facilities as “not perfect.”

Athletes had to take a bus about an hour before competing because Yoyogi Park’s main warm-up facility is located 2.5 kilometers away from the stadium, which is a 15-minute drive.

Hodgkinson described the circumstance as “draining.”

We were aware of the distance, according to Dunn, and we made the best of it because it was unusual.

“It wasn’t just us, so it wasn’t just us,” I said.

For the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, UK Sport pledged a record amount of money to the sport.

However, UK Athletics received a salary of £20.45 million for the current cycle as opposed to £22.7 million for the Paris 2024 season.

The company was “delighted” with the decision to reduce the sport’s share, according to Jack Buckner, CEO of UK Athletics.

Buckner cited the 2023 and 2024 medal hauls as evidence that the sport “deserved a higher level of investment.”

Despite the team’s lower return in Tokyo, Dunn anticipates that additional funding will follow.

I don’t believe it had a significant impact [here]. We’re going to do everything, Dunn said, though perhaps not everything.

We’re so appreciative of receiving that support. The best are catching up, but we’re still very fortunate, so the award will suffice for us to handle.

Retired four-time world champion heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill said on BBC TV: “It has to be]a springboard to do better.”

We discuss how injuries or changes make the year following an Olympic event funny. Although there are many things going on, we cannot deny our disappointment.

We anticipated a few more opportunities, but we did, and we were delighted to receive five medals for outstanding performances.

“But we can’t get away from the fact that we didn’t win any gold at these championships,” the statement read.

Ennis-Hill noted that this was not a nice statistic when the relay teams failed to win a medal for the first time since 2003. We are aware of the difficulty of championships. We have always won medals in the relay, but you come with injuries and a lot of pressure along the way.

There are so many different parts to the team, the members, the staff, and the funding, and I’m confident that GB will stop and examine this.

Hunter Bell and Hodgkinson, both 800m runners-up, coach Jenny Meadows, said: “We’ve talked about individuals and what happens the year after the Olympic Games.