Italy at the 2005 World Championships in Athletics Italy at the 2005 World Championships in Athletics Italy competed at the 2003 World Championships in Athletics in Paris, France from 6 to 14 August 2005. The nation sent a delegation of 49 athletes (27 men and 22 women) and won one medal at the competition. Alex Schwazer was the bronze medallist in the men's 50 kilometres race walk and he achieved a national record of 3:41:54 hours in the process. It was an unexpected medal, as Schwazer knocked nearly twenty minutes off his previous best that year. Among other Italian performances, three athletes finished fifth in field event finals:
Athletics at the 2016 Summer Olympics not the venue for the opening or closing ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro – that honour went to Brazil's foremost soccer venue, the Maracanã Stadium. On the first day, the first gold medal was won by Almaz Ayana of Ethiopia, who broke a long-standing world record in the women's 10,000 metres by almost fifteen seconds. The race as a whole was historically fast, setting four of the five fastest times ever for the distance and seeing eight national records broken. China's Wang Zhen was the first male winner of the 2016 Olympic athletics, topping the 20 kilometres race walk podium.