European U20 champion Lilianna Bátori produced the second best clearance of her career at the UdinJump Development meeting in the Italian city of Udine on Wednesday (4).
The 18-year-old Hungarian cleared 1.92m at the second attempt, just 1cm short of her own national U20 record. But she had to settle for second place on countback to USA’s Charity Hufnagel after both athletes failed at 1.94m at the World Athletics Indoor Tour Bronze meeting.
In the men’s competition, there was a surprising, but crowd-pleasing victory for Eugenio Meloni, a European U23 bronze medallist back in 2015. Now 31, the Italian and last year’s winner Tihomir Ivanov of Bulgaria were left in a jump off after 2.20m proved beyond the field.
With clean card to that height, the duo went head-to-head and after a further failure each at 2.20m, the bar was reset to 2.18m and after Ivanov failed again, Meloni leapt to victory. He became the first home winner at the meeting, since it became an international event in 2020.