Sara Kolak in the javelin at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (© Getty Images)
Led by Maria Andrejczyk’s Polish record of 67.11m, eight women bettered the automatic qualifying standard of 63.00m in women’s javelin qualifying on Tuesday evening.
The next four best throwers – a quartet which included German duo Christina Oberfoll and Christin Hussong – also advanced to make a field of 12 for the final on Wednesday.
Kathryn Mitchell of Australia had the last qualifying mark at 61.63m in group B; Kara Winger of the USA, also in group B, had the best non-qualifying mark at 61.02m.
Symmetrically, there were four automatic qualifiers in each group.
In group A, both the European champion Tatsiana Khaladovich of Belarus (63.78m) and Sunette Viljoen of South Africa (63.54m) qualified on their first throws.
In the third round, Lyu Huihui of China (63.28m) and Sara Kolak of Croatia (64.30m) joined them.
Kolak’s mark was a national record, her fourth of the year and an 80-centimetre improvement on the distance which got her the bronze medal at the recent European Championships. It stood as the third-best on the day.
Notable among the non-qualifiers in group A was Australia’s 2013 world silver medallist Kim Mickle, who dislocated her shoulder on her last throw and required aid on the field.
Three of the four automatic qualifiers in group B reached the mark on their first attempts, including Andrejczyk, 2010 European champion Linda Stahl of Germany at 63.95m, and Madara Palameika of Latvia at 63.03m.
Czech Republic’s two-time defending champion Barbora Spotakova, the last of the four women who came to Rio with a chance to become three-time Olympic champions in an individual event, qualified with her second throw. Her 64.65m was the second-best mark of the day.
As the competition wrapped up, Spotakova used the broadcast cameras to send a message to her three-year-old son, taking a small stuffed animal out of her bag and showing it to the camera with a big smile.
Parker Morse for the IAAF
