Australian golden girl Kelsey-Lee Barber is the javelin world champ
With her final throw, the golden girl of Australia’s athletics team produced a bomb to rock her opponents and announce herself as the new world javelin throw champion.
Athletics
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Kelsey-Lee Barber closed her eyes, let out a deep breath and tried to loosen her shoulders.
She could hear the message in her head from her husband/coach Mike sitting behind her in the stand.
“Find the calm in the moment,” was what he’d told her leading into the world championships javelin final.
Currently she was sitting in fourth position. This was her last throw. It was all or nothing. She needed that calm.
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A slight change to her run-up before the previous throw had felt good. Mike had liked what he’d seen.
After seeing the fifth throw get out to 63.65m he turned to Australian team coach Craig Hilliard next to him and said: “I reckon she might have this”.
He liked her body language. He also knew she had a track record of producing in the final round of competitions. The bigger the stakes the better she went.
“She just has this inate ability,” he would say later.
The moment Kelsey-Lee let the javelin go she knew it was clean. And for javelin throwers clean means good and more often than not it means big.
She was sure it was over 65 metres but wasn’t sure by how much. Then she saw the electronic screen flash up 66.56 and she lost it.
“My head was spinning a bit and then I was like wait, I can’t celebrate too early,” Kelsey-Lee said.
She’d just produced one of the great clutch moments in Australian sport but again she had to “find the calm” as there were three throwers remaining in the competition.
The two Chinese girls - one who’d won her past 12 competitions - had been the hot favourites coming into the event but they’d never faced this sort of pressure.
They both failed to handle it which meant Australia had its ninth track and field world champion and first ever in the javelin.
To put the clutch performance in perspective, Kelsey-Lee had just kicked a goal after-the-siren to win the AFL Grand Final.
And in the process put a target on the Canberra thrower’s back ahead of next year’s Tokyo Olympics.
“It’s pretty fantastic to have a bit of a target on my back,” she said. “If they keep pushing me I am going to throw further and next year hope to be on the podium again.”
The thought of being the best in the world started to solidify in Kelsey-Lee’s head two years earlier when she finished 10th in the world championships final in London.
Then when she won the silver medal at last year’s Commonwealth Games, everything turned to being the best in Doha.
“After 2017 worlds, it was disappointing to finish outside the top eight there and I really knew that is where I wanted to be, on the podium,” she said.
“Having success at Comm Games last year just cemented the fact that I love throwing javelin and that I want to be on a podium at a major championships. The goal was set then.”
And in the process put a target on the Canberra thrower’s back ahead of next year’s Tokyo Olympics.
“It’s pretty fantastic to have a bit of a target on my back,” she said. “If they keep pushing me I am going to throw further and next year hope to be on the podium again.”
The thought of being the best in the world started to solidify in Kelsey-Lee’s head two years earlier when she finished 10th in the world championships final in London.
Then when she won the silver medal at last year’s Commonwealth Games, everything turned to being the best in Doha.
“After 2017 worlds, it was disappointing to finish outside the top eight there and I really knew that is where I wanted to be, on the podium,” she said.
“Having success at Comm Games last year just cemented the fact that I love throwing javelin and that I want to be on a podium at a major championships. The goal was set then.”
SMOOTH SAILING
A lot of waiting around was all Brandon Starc had to complain about after cruising through qualifying in the men’s high jump.
Australia’s leading medal chance had one slip-up at 2.26m but then bounced back to comfortably clear 2.29m to book a spot in the final.
“One miss at 2.26 and the first attempt at 2.29 and that was it. Five jumps all up so that was pretty good,” Starc said.
“The main thing was just to get through to the final. It doesn’t really matter how pretty it was.
“There was a lot of waiting around and that was what my 2.26 miss was about I think.”
There was one high-profile casualty in qualifying with Syria’s Majed El Dein Ghazal, the bronze medallist from the 2017 world championships, missing out.
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