World Athletics Championships: Rohan Browning misses final in 100m event

Rohan Browning’s Budapest performance has hammered home what Australia’s fastest man needs to do to have any chance in at the Paris Olympics next year.

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY – AUGUST 20: Fred Kerley of Team United States and Rohan Browning of Team Australia compete in the Men's 100m Semi Final during day two of the World Athletics Championships Budapest 2023 at National Athletics Centre on August 20, 2023 in Budapest, Hungary. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

Rohan Browning says he will carry a chip on his shoulder leading into the Paris Olympics after coming up short at the world championships.

Australia’s fastest man wasn’t able to improve on his heat run, clocking 10.11sec to finish fourth in the semi-final, a race he’d had visions of breaking the magical 10-second barrier in.

The result further hammers home the fact to the Sydney university student that he needs to be a sub-10 runner next year to give himself any chance of making the Olympic final.

“I am just really disappointed,” Browning said after his first world championship semi-final. “I definitely felt like I was in shape to run a lot better. I felt like I had 60 metres of a really good race and the rest was really the reverse of yesterday.

“So I have some things to work on for the Olympics.”

After finishing second in his heat in 10.11sec less than 24 hours earlier, Browning spoke about how that performance was the average of his season’s times and that he was searching for something extraordinary in the semi-final.

Browning failed to crack the 10-second barrier and missed the final. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

But instead the 25-year-old got a reminder of how deep the talent is on the sprinting landscape with seven runners going under 10 seconds in the semi-final.

And that didn’t include the reigning world champion Fred Kersley (10.02sec) and Olympic champion Marcell Jacobs (10.06sec) who were also eliminated.

“I just wasn’t quite at the level I was hoping to be at. It felt quicker,” Browning said.

“You want to just chip away, it would have been nice to run a little quicker than yesterday but I knew sub-10 would be the benchmark to progress and that is where it ended up being more or less.

“There’s a lot of talent out there at the moment. Really deep and it’s super unpredictable.

“I feel like this year I haven’t run a PB but I feel like I have had a good year. I think how I evaluate the year isn’t so much on times, it’s more the softer lessons and skills.

“I’ve got a year to prep for the Olympics. Hopefully next year that average can be low 10s and nines in that level. I guess now I have 12 months of a chip on my shoulder going into Paris.”

Browning, who made the semi-finals of the Tokyo Olympics, had previously bombed out in the heats at his two other world championships appearances.

“I definitely had this monkey on my back for not making it out of the heats at world champs,” he said. “I had two shocking world champs and this has been a bigger step forward.

“It’s still not quite enough but what you hope for is irrelevant, you have to be good enough.”

Browning has decided not to continue racing this year, ending his three-month European stint and will fly home to Australia from Budapest later in the week.