13 August 2013

After winning 10,000m gold at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow on Saturday, Mo Farah (coach: Alberto Salazar) returned to the track to begin the defence his 5,000m title this morning.

The double Olympic champion safely made it through to the final thanks to a fifth place finish in his heat. Five athletes broke clear on the final lap and, with five automatic qualifying positions available, Farah was able to cruise through the line in a time of 13:23.93.

Farah, who won World Championship gold in this event in 2011, was pleased that he was able to qualify for Friday’s final comfortably. He said: “That was alright. I just wanted to do as little work as possible, freshen my legs up and get through to the final. I did that so I’ve just got to recover now and get ready for Friday.”

Robbie Grabarz (Fuzz Ahmed) had a faultless performance in qualifying for the final of the men’s high jump. The Olympic bronze medallist enjoyed first time clearances at every height up to 2.29m, enough to ensure straightforward qualification for Thursday’s final.

Afterwards, he said: “It was really nice to come out today and qualify strongly. Early starts aren’t really a problem to me so that probably played into my advantage here – I saw a couple of the other guys really struggle.”

Katarina Johnson-Thompson (Mike Holmes) jumped a personal best of 6.56m in the long jump, the fifth event of the heptathlon, to move up to fifth place in the overall standings. The result was her second personal best of the competition after running 23.37 in the 200m yesterday and left her on 4766 points overall with two events remaining, 150 points behind leader Ganna Melnichenko of Ukraine.

She then moved onto the javelin, and had three superb throws culminating in a personal best distance of 40.86m with her final effort. In put her in 19th position for the javelin event but more importantly saw her maintain her fifth position with just tonight’s 800m to run.

For full results from the morning session of day four in Moscow please go to:

http://www.iaaf.org/competitions/iaaf-world-championships/14th-iaaf-world-championships-4873/timetable/byday

In this afternoon’s session, Johnson Thompson concludes her heptathlon campaign with the 800m, Andrew Osagie (Craig Winrow) lines up in the men’s 800m final, Eilish McColgan (Liz McColgan) runs in the final of the women’s 3,000m steeplechase, Hannah England (Bud Baldaro) looks for a place in the final of the 1500m, Meghan Beesley (Nick Dakin), Eilidh Child (Malcolm Arnold) and Perri Shakes-Drayton (Chris Zah) compete in the semi-finals of the women’s 400m hurdles and defending champion Dai Greene (Arnold) is joined in the semi-finals of the men’s 400m hurdles by Rhys Williams (Adrian Thomas) and Sebastian Rodger (Stephen King).

Watch this afternoon’s session live on BBC2 between 15.45-19.30pm.

GB & NI finalists at the 2013 IAAF World Championships: