By Mitch Phillips
BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Australian Peter Bol endured an anti-climatic appearance at the World Athletics Championships on Tuesday as, having had a doping suspension lifted only weeks before the event, he looked well off the pace in the 800m heats and failed to progress.
Bol, fourth at the Tokyo Olympics and the Commonwealth Games silver medallist last year, was provisionally suspended in January after testing positive for synthetic erythropoietin (EPO).
However, in an unusual development, an “atypical finding” was discovered in his B sample leading to the ban being lifted in February. However, the case dragged on until the start of August when he was finally cleared by Sport Integrity Australia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bol looked off the pace in the first round on another hot, humid night in Budapest and once he realised he had no chance of making one of the three automatic qualifying slots, he virtually stopped running and jogged in fifth.
Other than tweeting his satisfaction at the turnaround, when he said “No-one should ever experience what I have gone through this year,” Bol has kept his counsel and refused to speak to reporters after his race on Tuesday.
Another high-profile absentee from Thursday’s semi-finals will be Olympic and defending world champion Emmanuel Korir, who came into the event on a run of poor form and finished fourth in his heat.
His Kenyan compatriot Emmanuel Wanyonyi was the fastest of the qualifiers with 1:44.92.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Toby Davis)
