At the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, 33 European track and field athletes won an individual medal, of which 26 came to compete at the European Championships in Rome, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen sports reporter
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ROME
On Monday evening, people from the world’s leading athletics agency company, the Dutch Global Sports Communication, had gathered for refreshments at an open-air restaurant located near the Olympic stadium in Rome.
In the agency company, the running star is especially close Sifan Hassan’s a person working with said what kind of so-called first world troubles in Tokyo 2021 weigh on Hassan, who won both the 5,000 and 10,000 meters Olympic gold.
From star miler to star marathoner
The runner who has evolved from a star miler to a star marathoner and still dominates everything in between is thinking about whether he would first of all try to win more track endurance gold medals in Paris. Or 1,500 and 5,000 meters? Or 10,000 meters and a marathon? Or 5,000 and 10,000 meters and a marathon?
Everyone has their sorrows.
Sifan Hassan belongs to those European athletes of the star category, even on a global level, who considered the European Championships this summer to be an unnecessary burden.
The other most famous absentees almost always carry a British passport: the 400m European record holder Matthew Hudson–Smiththe two previous world champions of 1500 meters viz Jake Wightman and Josh Kerr and mailer Laura Muir.
Almost everyone on the field
On the field side, the best are almost 100 percent involved themselves Armand Duplantis down to.
Will the European Championships held for the third time in the Olympic year suffer from the same star loss as the first attempt in Helsinki 2012? At that time, a very significant part of the Europeans who achieved top success at the World Championships in Daegu the previous year missed out due to the London Olympic Games organized later in the summer.
The answer to the question at the beginning of the previous paragraph is both yes and no.
Last summer, at the World Championships in Budapest, 20 European men achieved an individual medal. 13 of the female athletes were able to do this.
Of these athletes, 16 men and 10 women will participate in the European Championships in Rome, and the reason for the absentees’ absence is by no means invariably related to the belittling of the European Championships and the prioritization of the Olympic Games.
A positive doping sample
For example, a Spanish runner Mohammed Katir was caught doping, and a triple jumper Marina Beh–Romanshuk is injured.
Instead of the attraction of the European Championships, there is probably more reason to pay attention to how the European track and field athletes took a lousy slice of the World Cup medal cake in Budapest: only exactly a quarter.
So it’s not that European stars haven’t been able to be attracted to EC-Rome, but that there aren’t any more of them.
Raw score level
The home teams, dominated by the Italian athletes in front of very empty stands, had seen a wide range of brutally hard results even before the evening session of the penultimate race day: five world and 13 European top results, nine European Championship records and 35 national records, including two SE quotations. The list is getting longer.
Before the culmination of the games on Wednesday, the most exciting results have been, for example, the fast track Lorenzo Simonelli’s 13.05, quarter miler Natalia Kaczmarek’s 48.98, long jumper Miltiadis Tentoglou 865, ball pusher Leonardo Fabbrin 22.45 and Belgium’s amazing Alexander Doom track lap winning time 44.15.