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| Hungary's Krisztian Pars threw a world-leading 82.28m at the Ostrava Golden Spike meeting on Thursday. |
Hungary's 2011 World Championships hammer silver medallist and 2010 European Athletics Championships bronze medallist Krisztian Pars showed that he is in a phenomenal shape as he improved his own world-leading performance twice at the Ostrava Golden Spike meeting on Thursday.
Pars- with the hammer competitions in Ostava traditionally being held the day before the main meeting - opened with 81.37m on his first attempt and then improved to 82.28m in the second round.
He then decided to sit back and watch whether any of his rivals in the Czech Republic could get near him.
'I did not finish the competition because I felt a little pain in my back and I did not want risk a serious injury,' he commented afterwards.
'I was hoping that 82.28 would hold up the rest of the way but I don't think I'm in the very best shape just yet; I'd like to add one more metre to today's performance before the season is finished,' added Pars.
The only disappointment for pars in Ostrava, who also added more than a metre to his own old meeting record of 80.71m from 2009, was that he was just shy of his personal best of 82.45m, which dates from back in 2006.
Although almost two metres behind Pars, but still throwing extraordinarily well, was Poland's 2011 European Athletics U23 Championships gold medallist Pawel Fajdek, who went over 80 metres for the first time in his career.
After 77.46m in the first round, he launched his hammer out to 80.06m on his second and then improved to 80.36m with his next effort.
Russia's Aleksey Zagorniy finished third with a season's best of 78.40m while Germany's Markus Esser had several good throws in the second half of the competition to move up to fourth with 77.27m.
Germany's defending European champion Betty Heidler showed her class in the women's competition. Heidler was in command after four rounds with her best effort of 76.07m but then saw China's Asian record holder Zhang Wenxiu throw a big personal best to 76.99m to take the lead.
However, Heidler was the next woman in the ring and responded immediately with a meeting record of 78.07m, the second best distance this year and the fourth best ever.
Poland's former world champion and world record holder Anita Wlodarczyk took third with 74.81m.