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# Rumesh Tharanga Beats the World’s Best to Take Budapest Javelin Crown
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/rumesh-tharanga-beats-the-worlds-best-to-take-budapest-javelin-crown/
- Published: 2026-09-13T17:50:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-13T17:50:46.000Z
- Author: Sports Desk
- Tags: September 2026, Monitor Memo

**BUDAPEST —** Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage of Sri Lanka won the men's javelin at the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship on Sunday, throwing 91.09 metres in the fourth round to beat a field that included the reigning world, Olympic and European champions.

Pathirage, 23, opened poorly with 75.89 metres, then found his range with 85.69 in the second round. His third throw of 87.11 metres put him in front. The fourth ended the contest.

Anderson Peters of Grenada, a two-time world champion, took second with 86.18 metres. Julian Weber of Germany, the European champion and the only other man to pass 90 metres this year, was third with 85.89\. The eight-man field also included Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago, who won the world title in Tokyo last year, and Arshad Nadeem of Pakistan, the Olympic champion.

The result completes a season that has moved Pathirage from the margins to the top of the event. He finished seventh at the 2025 World Championships with 84.38 metres. In June this year, he threw 92.62 metres at the Rome Diamond League, a Sri Lankan record, a world-leading mark and the eighth-longest throw in history. He has held the world No. 1 ranking since August.

Along the way, he won the Commonwealth Games title in Glasgow with 89.75 metres, giving Sri Lanka its first athletics gold at those games since 1950, and then the Diamond League final in Brussels with 89.04 metres, the first Sri Lankan to take that title. He carried the flag at the Glasgow closing ceremony.

Pathirage was born in Kalutara in March 2003 and came to the javelin late. He was a fast bowler at St. Peter's College in Colombo, clocked at 134 kilometres an hour, before his father, a former discus and shot-put thrower, steered him toward athletics. He switched from the discus to the javelin in 2017\. He serves as a corporal in the Sri Lanka Air Force.

The Ultimate Championship is a new competition, staged for the first time at the National Athletics Centre in Budapest from Sept. 11 to 13\. World Athletics designed it as a biennial invitational restricted to Olympic and world champions, Diamond League winners and the year's highest-ranked athletes, with 28 events and a prize fund of $10 million. There are no qualifying rounds. The javelin was decided in a single final on Sunday evening, and the championship record was vacant going in.

Weber had arrived as the most credible threat, having thrown 90.40 metres at this year's European championships. He never got close to that mark in Budapest.