Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage won the men’s javelin at the Diamond League Final in Brussels on Saturday night with a throw of 89.04m, becoming the first Sri Lankan athlete to win a Diamond League title, Daily Mirror and Ada Derana reported.

“I’m truly very happy about that,” he said afterwards. “Coming from a small country like Sri Lanka, winning a major meet like this.”

He took the lead with his third attempt at the King Baudouin Stadium and was not passed. Poland’s Dawid Wegner finished second with a lifetime best of 87.47m and Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago was third with a season-best 83.99m. Grenada’s Anderson Peters was fourth on 83.70m and Kenya’s Julius Yego fifth on 76.79m, ahead of Belgium’s Timothy Herman (71.79m) and the United States’ Curtis Thompson (69.52m).

How the competition turned

Tharanga started slowly by his own standards, opening at 80.42m and managing only 79.73m with his second attempt. Walcott led the opening round on 83.99m before Wegner went to the top of the standings in the third with his personal best of 87.47m.

Tharanga answered in that same round with the 89.04m that decided the competition. He followed it with 85.96m and 85.76m, and his final throw went high and short and was ruled a foul — by which point the title was already his. Wegner could not improve on his third-round mark, leaving a winning margin of 1.57m. Just 29cm separated Walcott and Peters in the contest for third.

He put the distances down to the conditions. “Honestly, I couldn’t get a big throw today because the weather conditions were quite difficult — it was very cold,” he told Ada Derana, “so that’s why I couldn’t reach a big distance.”

India’s Neeraj Chopra, whom Tharanga beat by nine centimetres at Lausanne in August, did not compete in Brussels, having withdrawn from the final last week with an injury.

The season behind the win

World Athletics, in its report on the final night of the season, described Tharanga as an athlete “enjoying the season of his life” and put the Brussels win as his 12th victory in his past 13 events. It noted he finished short of the meeting record held by Jan Železný, the javelin world record holder, who was watching from the stands.

The win completes a season that has run almost unbroken since June. Tharanga threw 92.62m in Rome on June 4 for a national record that still leads the world in 2026, threw 88.68m in Doha, won Commonwealth Games gold in Glasgow with 89.75m — Sri Lanka’s first athletics gold at those Games — beat India’s Neeraj Chopra by nine centimetres at Lausanne with 88.14m, and threw 92.07m with his last attempt in Zurich in August for a fourth straight Diamond League win. It was the Zurich result that secured his place in Brussels.

He returned to world No. 1 in the World Athletics rankings in late August. He is 23, and a sergeant in the Sri Lanka Air Force.

What the title carries

The Diamond League Final is the season-ending meeting of the Wanda Diamond League, and its winners take the series title in their event rather than a single meeting win. When Tharanga qualified in Zurich, World Athletics noted that winning in Brussels also carries automatic entry to the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest.

Olympics.com’s published schedule for the final placed the men’s javelin at 20:40 Brussels time on Saturday, which is shortly after midnight in Sri Lanka.

Not reported

Ada Derana carried the result on Saturday evening UTC, around twenty hours after Daily Mirror’s overnight filing. NewsFirst and Hiru News had still not published on it at the time of writing.

There is no reaction yet from the Sri Lanka Athletics association or from the government. Neither report gives his full series points total, and it is not stated whether he will compete again this season before Budapest. No outlet has reported the nature or severity of Chopra’s injury.

Sources