Race walker Takayuki Tanii, who captured a bronze medal in the men’s 50-km competition at this summer’s IAAF World Championships in Beijing, was named the athlete of the year at the annual Athletic Awards of the Japan Association of Athletics Federations in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Marathoner Mai Ito, race walkers Yusuke Suzuki and Hirooki Arai and the men’s 4×100 relay members (Kazuma Oseto, Kenji Fujimitsu, Yoshihide Kiryu and Kotaro Taniguchi) for the World Relays in Bahamas were also honored.
“Just thinking back where I was a few years ago, there was no way that I could think of winning something like this because I’d had a lot of struggles and injuries,” said Tanii, who delivered the only podium finish for Team Japan during the World Championships in China with a time of 3:42:55. But I’ve patiently trained myself and now I’ve earned this. I’m extremely happy.”
Tanii, 32, said he would definitely shoot for winning the gold medal in next year’s Rio Olympics, using his accomplishment this year as a steppingstone.
“I won the bronze medal, but that means there are still two men ahead of me, and there are more people who have better records than me,” Tanii said. “So I’ve got to make it just a checkpoint in order to ultimately win (the gold medal).”
This year wound up being the season for the race walking, as Suzuki set the 20-km world record in March in Ishikawa Prefecture, while Tanii and Arai finished third and fourth at worlds in August.
Tanii was pleased to see his sport earn much more attention than ever, saying, “this is something we could not have imagined a few years ago.” He added that Japan’s top-level walkers have worked hard, setting their goals at prevailing on the global stage.
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to advertise more that Japan can compete at the world level in this sport,” said Tanii, who won the outstanding award in 2014 for earning the gold medal in the Asian Games in South Korea.
Unpublished photos of Takayuki Tanii, Yusuke Suzuki, Koichiro Morioka
together with the tcoach Koji Hga Miura in a training camp in Saluzzo back in March 2004