Great Britain’s 2010 World Junior Championships hammer gold medallist Sophie Hitchon made herself a medal favourite for the European Athletics U23 Championships in Ostrava, Czech Republic, when she twice beat the British senior record on Sunday.
Competing at the British Universities Championships in Bedford, Hitchon threw 68.97m in the second round and then improved further to 69.43m in the fifth round of her competition to delete Lorraine Shaw’s 2003 mark of 68.93m from the record books.
The performance leads this year’s under 23 world rankings and is almost two metres further than Moldova’s Zalina Marghieva threw to take the gold medal at the 2009 European Athletics U23 Championships in Lithuania.
However, the 19-year-old Hitchon will possibly face Romania’s prodigious former two-time world and European junior champion Bianca Perie in Ostrava.
Perie, who turns 21 on 1 June, won the under 23 competition at this year’s European Cup Winter Throwing in March with 67.38m, when Hitchon finished second with 64.16m, but she threw 73.52m last year.
Another impressive performance at the British Universities Championships came from 400m hurdler Jack Green, who clocked a personal best of 49.55.
Like Hitchon, Green is still only 19 but turns 20 later this year.
In similar fashion, Green also provided a warning that he will be among the men to beat in Ostrava as his time in Bedford was faster than that which got the gold two years ago, when fellow British hurdler Lloyd Gumbs won with 49.62.
The European Athletics U23 Championships best performances in Hitchon and Green’s events were both set by Polish athletes competing on home soil in Bydgoszcz in 2003; the late Kamila Skolimovska throwing 71.38m and Marek Plawgo running 48.45.
The 2011 European Athletics U23 Championships in Ostrava, Czech Republic, will take place between 14-17 July.