Sri Lanka’s Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage produced one of the great javelin throws in history at the Rome Diamond League on Thursday, sending the spear out to 92.62 metres on his second attempt to claim the world-leading mark for 2026 and become Asia’s second-best thrower of all time.
The 23-year-old’s throw is now the eighth-best in world history and rewrites the Sri Lanka national record. It also broke the Rome Diamond League meet record of 90.34m set by Norway’s Andreas Thorkildsen in 2006, ending a 20-year tenure for the previous mark, Newswire reported.
The Rome distance is a personal best by a significant margin and lifts Pathirage above the 90-metre line — the symbolic threshold separating world-class throwers from genuine world-record contenders. The current world record is 98.48m, set by Czech thrower Jan Železný in 1996.
Pathirage’s rise has been steep. He had only just been confirmed in fifth place on the men’s world javelin rankings earlier on Thursday after his silver-medal 85.97m throw at the Rabat Diamond League on Monday, and a gold-medal 89.28m meet record at the Kip Keino Classic in Nairobi last month. The 92.62m performance is likely to lift him well above fifth when World Athletics next refreshes its rolling Average Performance Score table.
Andreas Thorkildsen, the man whose Rome record fell on Thursday night, is a two-time Olympic gold medallist (Athens 2004, Beijing 2008) and a former world champion — context that underlines the scale of Pathirage’s effort. Sri Lanka has never previously held a world all-time top-10 javelin throw or a Diamond League meet record at this level.
Pathirage’s next major outings are expected on the remaining Diamond League circuit and at the year’s global championships, where Sri Lanka now carries a credible podium prospect in a discipline dominated for decades by European and Caribbean athletes. NewsFirst reported on Friday that his immediate next event is the Open Athletics Championship in the Czech Republic on June 16, after which he is targeting the World Athletics Championships, the Diamond League Final and the Commonwealth Games. “I am extremely happy to have broken the Sri Lankan record for the fourth time along with setting a new meet record at a Diamond League competition,” he told the broadcaster. “My next goals are the World Ultimate Championship, the Diamond League Final, and the Commonwealth Games. I’m aiming to achieve something big in all three.” Coach Tony Prasanna said the throw demonstrated that Sri Lankan athletes could “compete with and surpass athletes from countries with far greater resources” and that the achievement reflected the athlete’s “dedication, courage, and determination”.
Ada Derana and NewsFirst confirmed the 92.62m mark on Friday morning, with Ada Derana noting the throw beat a field that included Grenada’s Anderson Peters, Trinidad and Tobago’s Keshorn Walcott, Germany’s Thomas Röhler and the United States’ Curtis Thompson — among the best contemporary throwers in the discipline. Both outlets called the performance Sri Lanka’s strongest claim yet to an Olympic athletics medal since Duncan White’s 400m hurdles silver at London 1948 and Susanthika Jayasinghe’s 200m bronze at Sydney 2000, the country’s only two Olympic medals in athletics. The 23-year-old now enters the Los Angeles 2028 cycle as a frontrunner in the men’s javelin.
