The Russian trio of Anisya Kirdyapkina, Olga Kaniskina and Vera Sokolova effected a clean sweep of the women's 20km walk  on Wednesday.

Russia’s ace Olga Kaniskina may be only 25 years of age but she has already accomplished every title that any European athlete aspired for : the Olympic, the world and now the continental honours.

Despite setting a modest, by her standards, 1:28:26 SB, the mathematics student won the women's 20km walk gold medal in Barcelona on Wednesday morning. Behind the overwhelming victor, her 20-year-old fellow Russian Anisya Kirdyapkina claimed silver while Vera Sokolova completed the first clean sweep of medals for any country at the women’s walk race event in the history of the championships. 

The race kicked off in a conservative way with a slow 4:58 split for the opening kilometre; it was Portugal’s Vera Santos who led the 22-woman pack tracked by the Spanish duo of María Vasco and Beatriz Pascual, both of them Barcelona-based walkers.

The second kilometre was much faster (4:29) largely due to the pacing duties made by Germany’s Melanie Seeger and the leading group was down to 15 before the third kiometre. The following 1000m sections were covered in the 4:30-4.35 range and it was then that the Russian duo of Olga Kaniskina and Anisya Kirdyapina moved to the front for the first time closely followed by Pascual and Vasco. The brisk rhythm set by the Russians (4:24 for the fifth kilometre) pay dividends and the tandem soon opened a sizeable margin over the chasing group.

But Kaniskina only walked for one kiolmetre in the company of her fellow Russian and decided to edge ahead with terrific subsequent laps of 4:12 and 4:11 which killed the race. In a matter of 2000m the European silver medallist Kaniskina had a 10-second advantage on Kirdyapina and 18 on a chasing group formed by the two Spaniards, Santos, Seeger and Russia’s Vera Sokolova.

By the halfway point it became clear that, barring disaster, Kaniskina would complete the ‘triple crown’ by adding the European title to her previous Olympic and world (twice) gold medals. Timed at 44:11, she maintained the 10-second advantage on Kirdyapina but the margin over the quintet had rapidly increased to a massive 40 seconds.

A few metres later the chances of this year’s World cup winner Vasco vanished as she was forced to retire after suffering cramps on her right leg.

At each of the U-turns on the tight 1km course, Kaniskina could clearly see her rivals and must have taken heart as she had strenghtened her lead to the 20-second advantage on Kirdyapina by the 12km point while the chasing quartet soon split up in two tandems, with Seeger and Sokolova ahead of Pascual and Vera.

For the closing kilometres, Kaniskina’s only entartainment seemed to be to lap other walkers while the focus turned out to the fierce battle for the bronze medal. At the 16th kiometre Kaniskina dominated in 1h09:59, 50s clear of Kirdyapina while Sokolova was a massive 1:30 in arrears, herself six seconds ahead of a threatening Pascual, this year’s victor at the La Coruña permit and sixth at both the Beijing Olympics and the Berlin worlds over the last two seasons. By then Seeger and Santos had not real chances to make the podium as she travelled well behind the top three spots.

At the finish line Kaniskina was timed at a SB of 1h27:44 (44:11 and 43:43 for the two halves) some 1:11 on Kirdyapina with Sokolova a distant third with a 1h29:32 clocking. Sadly for the local fans Pascual not only could not catch Sokolova over the closing laps but she was overtaken by Seeger instead and so the 28-year-old Spaniard had to be satisfied with the fifth place nine seconds adrift the German.

16 out of 22 walkers finished the race.