Great Britain’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson wins first global gold at World Indoor Championships 2018
The 25-year-old was competing in the five-discipline event for the first time since winning European Indoor gold in 2015
KATARINA JOHNSON-THOMPSON finally grabbed her first global title with pentathlon gold at the World Indoors.
The 25-year-old was competing in the five-discipline event for the first time since winning European Indoor gold in 2015 - which was her last major gong.
She famously choked at the World Championships in 2015 when she suffered three failures in her best event the long jump and handed British rival Jess Ennis-Hill the heptathlon title.
Then at the Rio Olympics she could only finish sixth as Ennis-Hill took silver and despite switching coaches a year ago and no longer in the shadow of her British team-mate who had retired she was fifth at the World Championships in London.
She admitted: "World champion..it's been a long time coming. But I truly believed this was my time.
"It's been a long day, five events in one day is something I haven't done for a long time."
In Birmingham, with Olympic and world heptathlon champion Nafi Thiam giving the indoor season a miss and with no javelin - her weakest event - the gold medal was there for her to lose.
After a poor opening 60m hurdles, clocking 8.36secs, she moved into first place following a best leap of 1.91m in the high jump while an indoor personal best of 12.68m in the shot put meant she dropped just one place to second after three events.
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Johnson-Thompson, 25, went into last night's long jump on 2873 points, just 13 points shy of Cuba's Yorgelis Rodriguez, who beat her to fourth place at London 2017.
Her best effort of 6.50m saw the Liverpool athlete take the lead again by 33 points.
She then delivered in the 800m, winning in 2:16.63 to ease out Austria's Ivona Dadic who took bronze with the Cuban clinching silver.
But her winning tally of 4750pts was still 250pts worse than when she won the European title.
Laura Muir eased her way into Saturday's 1500m showdown, clocking 4:06.54 to finish second in her heat behind arch-rival Dibaba just 24 hours after winning 3,000m bronze.
Muir, the reigning European Indoor 1500m and 3000m champion, will again face a tough test in her favoured event from Dibaba and Sifan Hassan who took 3,000m gold and silver ahead of her on Thursday and are also doubling up. Hassan is now coached by Mo Farah's controversial former mentor Alberto Salazar.
The 24 year-old said: " I obviously wanted to get that top two spot and that was a tough heat with Dibaba in it but I got the job done so I’m really happy with it.
"I’ve been eating, seeing my physio and just relaxing as much as possible (after the 3,000m). I had the little mint chocolate from my hotel room last night and that was my ‘little treat’"
