Italy's Massimo Stano won the men's 35km race walk at the World Athletics Championships in dramatic fashion on Sunday, edging Japan's Masatora Kawano by one second. Stano and Kawano battled shoulder-to-shoulder as the leading pair in the final 4km, but the Italian coped well with the pressure and accelerated in the final 300m to seal the gold medal.

Grabbing an Italian flag when he was on the final stretch, the 20km race walk Olympic champion finished in a time of 2:23:14, while Kawano sank to his knees in despair after crossing the line a second later. "I can't believe even if I won the Olympic gold. In theory, it would be easy to understand what happened today, but it is not," Stano said.