Toshikazu Yamanishi sets half-marathon race walk world record in Kobe

KOBE – Japan’s Toshikazu Yamanishi set a men’s half-marathon race walk world record on Feb 15, clocking 1:20:34 at the Japanese Half-Marathon Race Walking Championships in Kobe.

His time bettered the inaugural world record of 1:21:30, approved by the World Athletics Council in December, by 54 seconds.

Yamanishi, who was celebrating his 30th birthday, pulled away from a leading pack shortly after the 17km mark and reached 20km mark in 1:16:26 – just 16 seconds shy of the 20km race walk world record he set on the same course in 2025.

With an additional lap now included in the half-marathon race walk distance, the two-time world champion accelerated again over the closing stretch to win comfortably in record time.

World Athletics approved inaugural world record standards for the half-marathon and marathon race walking events. The approved inaugural world record standard for the men’s half-marathon race walk was set at 1:21:30.

There was another record broken in North Carolina.

American athletics prodigy Cooper Lutkenhaus broke the world junior indoor 800m record on Feb 14 with a victory in 1min 44.03secs at the Sound Running meet in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The 17-year-old Texan won the invitational event by 0.70 of a second over Penn State’s Handal Roban to become the sixth-fastest athlete indoors in 800m history.

Lutkenhaus erased the Under-20 world record of 1:44.35 set in January 2000 by Russian Yuriy Borzakovskiy, who won 800m Olympic gold in 2004 at Athens.

Lutkenhaus was a stunning runner-up at the 2025 American championships at Eugene, Oregon, to earn a berth in the 2025 World Championships at Tokyo.

Also in the Winston-Salem meet, Paris Olympic 1,500m champion Cole Hocker won the mile in 3:45.94 with fellow American Cooper Teare second in 3:50.49.

Hocker clocked the second-fastest world indoor mile time in history behind the world record of 3:45.14 set by Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen last February in France.

Over in Kingston, Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah, a five-gold former Olympic champion, competed in her first race since June 2024 in the Feb 14 Camperdown Classic in Jamaica.

Thompson-Herah, who won back-to-back Olympic titles in the 100m and 200m in 2016 at Rio de Janeiro and five years later in Tokyo, was third at 60m in 7.24 seconds (-1.7 m/s wind).

It was an encouraging return for Thompson-Herah, who has been hampered by injuries for several years, including an Achilles injury in 2024.

Thompson-Herah has not competed in an individual international championship since the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, Oregon, where she took bronze in the 100m and silver in the 4x100m relay.

She settled for the relay at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest and had only competed in two races in 2024.

Thompson-Herah won Commonwealth Games gold at 100m and 200m in 2022 at Birmingham. REUTERS, AFP