PARIS — On her second-last throw of the night, Camryn Rogers found another gear.
Sitting in second place on the leaderboard, Rogers spun and released the hammer down the middle of the field. It flew over the 75-metre mark and landed with a thud: 76.97 metres. In a tight field where Rogers had been trailing first China’s Jia Zhao and later America’s Annette Echikunwoke, Rogers had finally muscled herself into the gold-medal position.
No other throwers in the field could match it. As Rogers stepped into the box for her final throw, she had already won gold. She fouled the last throw, then knelt to the ground and raised her hands to her face, not quite able to mask the tears.
Echikunwoke — the only other competitor to surpass the 75-metre mark — took silver with a 75.48m throw while Zhao finished third with a best throw of 74.27m.
When Rogers made her Olympic debut in Tokyo, she was a 22-year-old college student at the University of California, Berkeley and finished fifth. Since then, she’s become a professional athlete at the top of her sport.
The 25-year-old from Richmond, B.C. came into these Games as the reigning world champion with a season’s best throw of 77.76 metres, which was the second-farthest throw in the world this year behind American Brooke Andersen’s 79.92 metres. Andersen, the 2022 world champion, fouled all her attempts at the U.S. Olympic trials and was not named to the American Olympic team.
“Camryn is one of the most talented athletes in the world,” her coach Mo Saatara told Postmedia this spring. “She won the worlds at age 24. The sky is the limit.”
Rogers’ throw comes two days after Canada’s Ethan Katzberg won the men’s hammer competition with a whopping 84.12-metre throw. Both throwers are from British Columbia, which has become a hotbed of the country’s greatest hammer throw coaches and athletes and is the only province in Canada where high school students compete in hammer throw. Rowan Hamilton, a 24-year-old from Chilliwack who finished ninth in Sunday’s men’s final, is also coached by Saatara.
Women’s hammer throwing debuted at the world championships in 1999 and the Olympics in 2000. For two decades, the event was dominated by athletes from Poland, China, Germany, Cuba and Russia, but North American athletes have been stepping up to the podium in recent years. At the 2022 world athletic championships, where Rogers finished second behind Andersen, American Janee’ Kassanavoid rounded out the podium. A year later when Rogers topped the field, Kassanavoid was second and American DeAnna Price third.
With files from Dan Barnes