On Wednesday evening, Norway can take a grand slam at the World Athletics Championships. Then Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Karsten Warholm will run their respective finals. But pictures show that Warholm’s journey could have already ended in Monday’s semi-finals.
Pictures of the race show that Warholm could very well have been disqualified. This is because the Norwegian was responsible for a suspected unapproved hurdle passage during the race.
– We have looked at these pictures several times and tried to see it from different angles. If you look at (this) picture, it definitely looks suspicious that he is then under the hedge. The fact that he is outside does not matter, as long as he does not step on the line, says TV4 expert Carolina Klüft and continues:
– But if he is under the highest point on the hurdle with his foot, then it is not really an approved hurdle passage and then he would have risked being disqualified.
After the race, Italy filed a protest against Warholm, but the response from the organizer was that the time to file a protest had passed. Thus, the Norwegian avoided possible penalties after the race.
– I can say that this is the most difficult thing to assess in arena athletics. Hurdle passages of 400 meters hurdles in the curve. You need to be able to look at all angles to be able to see if a leg in any way in the passage goes lower than the edge of the hedge, it is very difficult, says A Lennart Julin and continues:
– I hope that it is the case that the officials, right from the beginning, looked at this. They have many more pictures than the ones we get to see on TV. Because it is also the case that everyone in the athletics world knows that Karsten has a very special technique with the first leg and in the beginning he was probably very close to washing up. In recent years there have been no problems, but here he was perhaps a little out of balance.
The question of whether it was the right decision to overlook Warholm’s hurdle passage has been raised ahead of Wednesday’s final, where the Norwegian is therefore the favorite to take home the gold.
– I hope it’s really the case that they have looked at it, because I don’t think it’s the spirit of athletics to say you came in with the protest too late, then we ignore this’. It would have been better if they had said ‘we’ve looked at this, we can’t determine for sure that this was an error, therefore we’ve let it go,'” says Julin, before concluding:
– It would have been a nicer handling, so that people don’t think that ‘your name is Warholm, you can do whatever you want’.
Stream the Athletics World Championships on TV4 Play
TV4 broadcasts from the Athletics World Championships in Budapest 2023 between 19 and 27 August with several Swedish medal hopefuls and international world stars.