Gold Coast: When Caster Semenya accepted the honour of being South Africa’s flag-bearer at the Commonwealth Games, she promised her country she’d bring home two gold medals.
The world and two-time Olympic 800-metre champion won her favoured event on Friday night to complete the middle-distance double, adding the 800m title to her earlier victory in the 1,500m. She won both in Games-record times.
Semenya narrowly missed the double at the world championships last year, winning the 800m but taking bronze in the longer race.
She didn’t leave anything to chance on the Gold Coast. Semenya surprised her rivals by dictating the pace from the start of the final and maintained a commanding lead for the most of the race to finish in 1 minute, 56.68 seconds.
Semenya said her focus in Australia was on clinching the double — as it will be at every major championship through the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 — rather than have a crack at the world record of 1:53.28 world record set by Jarmila Kratochvilova in 1983. That can wait a few months.
“I’m still young — just turned 27. Still want to have three, four, five months before I decide if I want a world record or not,” she said. “Obviously it’s not that much important at the moment. What’s important now is to be able to win every race that I run.”
Kenya’s Margaret Nyairera Wambui, the Olympic bronze medallist, took silver in 1:58.07 and Natoya Goule of Jamaica ran a career-best 1:58.82 to win the bronze.
Joshua Cheptegei won a longer distance double for Uganda, adding the 10,000m title in a games record 27:19.62 to go with his earlier win in the 5,000m.
New Zealanders flocked to the Carrara Stadium hoping for two gold medals, with Valerie Adams targeting a fourth consecutive Commonwealth Games title in the shot put and Eliza McCartney among the favourites in the women’s pole vault. They both finished with silver.
Canada’s Alysha Newman set a games record 4.75m to win the pole vault, with a mark five centimetres higher than McCartney.
Jamaica’s Danniel Thomas-Dodd’s last shot of 19.36m was good enough for gold, breaking a tie with Adams at 18.70m.
The 33-year-old Adams, coming back to competition for the first time since having her first child last year, said having her family and baby in the crowd helped give her perspective.
The night’s last event, the women’s 100m hurdles, was expected to be Australia’s moment. World and former Olympic champion Sally Pearson featured in all the PR as the local girl but withdrew before the program started with an injury. Oluwatobiloba Amusan of Nigeria won in her absence in a meet record 12.68 from Jamaicans Danielle Williams and Yanique Thompson.
After competing in seven disciplines in two days, England’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson won the heptathlon with 6,255 points, a margin of 122 over silver-medallist Nina Schultz of Canada.
Johnson-Thompson held a 126-point lead over Schultz overnight and extended her lead to 225 with a competition-best 6.50m in the long jump. Schultz cut the margin with superior marks in the javelin and the 800m but not by enough to threaten for gold. England’s Niamh Emerson ran the fastest time in the 800m to take bronze.
In a dramatic finish in the 3,000m steeplechase, Olympic and world champion Conseslus Kipruto won in a meet record 8 minutes, 10.08 seconds to lead a sixth consecutive Kenyan sweep of the medals in that event at the Commonwealth Games.
Urging his teammates on as he moved into lane two coming out of the final curve, Kipruto started his celebrations halfway down the last stretch and was followed in by Abraham Kibiwott.
“We planned, it’s a tactical game,” Kipruto said. “I was controlling the race and ... after the last water jump I called the second guy and was waiting to see the back guy coming because I knew the Canada guy was tired. If I had left them behind they might not have pushed.”
