Last week, I was very lucky (a) to be in Rome, where the 2024 European Athletics Championships were taking place along the 4th Italian meeting on probability and mathematical statistics, and (b) to meet with my long-time friend Brunero Liseo, who happened to have a free ticket for the evening of Day 5, thanks to his involvement in the National Antidoping organisation.
I thus had this unique opportunity to attend the night events of that #5 day, with the female 10,000m, the male decathlon 1500m, both female and male 400m hurdles, high and triple jumps, with javelins flying over the entire evening!
The 10,000m race was quite impressive, with Slovenia’s Klara Lukan leading for the first half, but Italia’s Nadia Battocletti dominating the final laps to end up in 30:51, several seconds ahead of the Netherlands’ Diane van Es. After winning the gold for the 5000m on the previous Friday. The difference (of several minutes) between the runners was unexpected. The 1500m was less impressive as decathlonists have to allocate resources to ten different sports! For instance, the former French Olympic Gold Kevin Mayer ended up in 4:55, which amounts to 3:16 per kilometer (slower than my kilometre personal best in high school) but with enough points to qualify for the Paris Olympics. (Points being counted in a most interesting way as a scaled power of |b-t| for the ten decathlon events, where t is the athlete’s measure and b a “worst” reference!) As predicted the 400m hurdles were a treat, esp. with outliers Femke Bol and Karsten Warholm taking over. The most dramatic event came last however, when Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi… passed alone 2m33, then 2m35 and last 2m37 after a shaky beginning at 2m22! The stadium went bersek, obviously.
The championships were also visible in the City, in particular at the airport, redecorated for the occasion where I crossed athletes when arriving (like the Swiss Gold medalist Angelina Moser and her special piece of luggage) and departing (with three anonymous French athletes in my plane). But I did not meet any obvious champion over my two morning runs!
