A DEVASTATED LAURA Reynolds was at a complete loss to explain her disappointing performance at the World Athletics Championships in Moscow.
Reynolds went into the final of the 20km walk this morning hoping to improve on her 20th-place finish at the Olympics but never hit her stride and had to settle for 31st.
The Leitrim athlete was back in 37th at the 10km mark and improved slightly over the second half of the race, finishing in 1:33:39.
Her time was more than two minutes slower than her personal best of 1:31:02 which she set in London last summer.
“I’m just very disappointed,” Reynolds, 24, told Will Downing. “I don’t know what happened.
(©INPHO/Ian MacNicol)
“I didn’t feel good for the whole race, I was very sluggish for the first 10km. I was able to pick it up from 10km for a few kilometres but then I fell back again. It wasn’t a good race, that was it.
“I was very happy with how training was going and I was very excited coming into this. I was in great form. I don’t know, it just wasn’t reflected and that’s why I’m so disappointed. I’ve no real explanation as to why it went so wrong.”
Russia’s Elena Lashmanova took gold (1:27:08) ahead of Anisya Kirdyapkina (1:27:11) in a 1-2 for the home nation, with China’s Liu Hong almost a minute back in third (1:28:10).
