Walsh reclaims world indoor shot put title in Nanjing

Bronze, gold, gold, bronze, silver and now gold once again.

Tom Walsh’s love affair with the World Athletics Indoor Championships show few signs of abating as the New Zealander picked up his third title and his sixth medal in all in the shot put.

You have to go back to 2012 for a time when the 31-year-old did not feature at all on the podium at the World Indoors despite this being his first indoor outing of the season.

Any sense that might see him lack the necessary rhythm and fluency to compete against the world’s best were quickly dispelled. Historically, he has only once competed indoors at an event prior to these championships and again there was no sense of rust in his throwing action.

He took the lead with his opening throw and was never toppled for the duration of the competition, a season’s best 21.65m enough for gold by three centimetres from Roger Steen, one of two US athletes in the final. The other, Adrian Piperi, took the bronze with a best of 21.48m.

For Walsh, it was a competitive return to form and fitness after the disappointment of last summer at the Paris Olympics.

The two-time Olympic bronze medallist suffered an adductor tear in that Olympic final, which ended his hopes of completing a hat-trick of Olympic medals eight years on from his first but also brought an abrupt close to his 2024 season as a result.

Outside the shot put circle, Walsh became a father for the first time in the wake of those Games and took off the entire month of October to be with his wife Dana and the couple’s baby daughter.

But he resumed his off-season training, which involves a diet of 5,000 calories in order to keep up his required bulk, in November as well as his rehabilitation work to build for the briefest of indoor campaigns.

On paper, Italian duo Leonardo Fabbri and Zane Weir, were the leading throwers from the list of finalists in 2025 but neither could trouble the medal order.

Fabbri, a bronze medallist at the same event in Glasgow last year, could not get close to the 21.95m season’s best he produced at the World Indoor Athletics Indoor Tour Gold meeting in Lievin last month. He was more than half a metre shy of that in Sunday’s final.

Weir, meanwhile, ended up eighth with a best of 20.63m, some way off the sort of consistent levels he had thrown indoors in this season to date.

Matt Majendie for World Athletics