Evan Dunfee has won bronze in the men’s 50km Race Walk event at the Tokyo Olympics.
Posted Aug 06, 2021, 06:12AM EDT
Evan Dunfee has won bronze in the men’s 50km Race Walk event at the Tokyo Olympics.
The 30-year-old from Richmond, B.C., reached the podium in a season-best time of 3:50.59 in a race of attrition amid the heat and humidity of Sapporo. The temperature at the 5:30 a.m. start was 25 C with over 70 per cent humidity and it got hotter as the race progressed.
Dunfee was one of the few to manage the heat over 25 laps of the two-kilometre course, having endured sweltering conditions at the 2019 world championship in Doha, Qatar, where he also went on to win bronze.
Poland’s Dawid Tomala captured gold, Germany’s Jonathan Hilbert claimed silver.
Fellow Canadian Mathieu Bilodeau of Quebec City was classified 45th.
It is Canada’s 19th medal at the Summer Games.
This is Canada’s first ever medal in the 50km event and their second in this discipline. Guillaume LeBlanc is Canada’s only other race walk medallist with a silver in the 20km event in Barcelona in 1992.
The International Olympic Committee will remove the 50km race walk from the Summer Games program for gender balance. There isn’t a women’s 50k race walk but men and women both compete in the 20km event.
