Germany's Raul Spank in High Jump qualifying (© Getty Images - Allsport)
The men’s High Jump became the first of the three vertical jumps contested so far in Daegu to produce finalists who had to clear the automatic qualifying height.
Eighteen men cleared 2.28m, one height below the 2.31m required for automatic qualification, so the bar in both groups had to be raised to 2.31m.
Two men who will be glad, almost regardless of the outcome of the final on Thursday, are Darwin Edwards of St Lucia and Zhang Guowei of China.
Edwards, who is based in Britain, set a new St Lucian national record in clearing 2.31m. His competitive record for 2011 reads like a club athlete’s – lots of regional and British League meetings, just one international, at Cork, in Ireland – but now he can add ‘World Championships finalist’ to his resume. He is St Lucia’s first finalist.
Zhang merely got a personal best of 2.31m. Both China’s national record and the honour of being its first World Championships finalist belong to Zhu Jianhua who held the world record at 2.37m, 2.38m and 2.39m as he was a bronze medallist at the first World Championships in Helsinki in 1983 and the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games.
Zhang is China’s first finalist since, and didn’t he celebrate – ripping off his singlet and waving it to the group of Chinese supporters gathered at the high jump fan end.
Ten men got 2.31m with another three – Aleksey Dmitrik, Russian champion at 2.36m, Raul Spank and Trevor Barry advancing as they were tied at 2.28m. So there will be 13 finalists, lucky for someone.
As usual, the qualifiers did so with varying degrees of comfort. Osaka 2007 champion Donald Thomas got 2.31m at the second attempt, and gave the bar a good old wallop as he went over. Somehow it stayed up.
Among the favourites, Mutaz Essa Barshim, Ivan Ukhov, Jesse Williams, Aleksandr Shustov and Jaroslav Baba got through with a minimum of fuss, while Dmytro Demyanyuk of the Ukraine, the surprise winner of the European Team championships at 2.35m, made it with a third-time clearance at 2.31m.
Another to make his first major final was Dimitrios Chondrokoukis of Greece. He was sixth at the 2006 world junior championships and has cleared 2.32m this year.
Kyriakos Ioannou of Cyprus, the silver medallist in Berlin two years ago and eighth performer in the world this year at 2.33m, did not compete in the qualifying round.
Len Johnson for the IAAF
