Latvian hurdles printer Dmitrijs Laschenko reached the semi-finals of the 400-meter hurdles sprint at the U20 World Athletics Championships in Nairobi on Thursday.
In his run, Lashenko completed the distance in 52.57 seconds, yielding only to Turkish Berk Akcham, who was 0.17 seconds faster.
He was 0.27 seconds behind the personal record reached in Valmiera over the weekend.
There were five races in the preliminaries and the four best athletes of each race reached the semi-finals, as well as the owners of the four best results from the other athletes.
Lashenko showed the tenth fastest result out of 29 barrier printers in the preliminaries. Deniss Novoseļcevs, who started under the neutral flag, completed the barrier lap the fastest, the result was 50.88 seconds.
The semi-finals will take place on Saturday in the afternoon session.
Latvia will also be represented in the World Championships by Marta Marks in the 100-meter hurdles, Lāsma Zemīte in the high jump, Darja Sopov in the long jump and three-pole jump, Agate Caune in the 1500 and 3000 meters and Kamilla Vanadziņš in the 1500 meters. It has already been reported that Makars Korotkovs took the 21st place in hammer throwing.
Juris Petrovičs, Ainis Raubišķis and Dmitrijs Milkevičs accompanied the athletes as coaches and service staff.
The U20 World Athletics Championships will run until Sunday. Almost 1,000 young athletes from 116 countries will take part in it. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, young athletes from the world’s athletics (USA, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, Germany), as well as China, Norway and New Zealand are not participating.
.
