With two fouls from her three long jumps in qualifying at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Gothenburg, Romania’s Florentina Marincu failed to make the final. Her distance was 5.98m, she finished 17th of the 19 competitors and there were no need for any headlines.
Yet it was not so much about where she ended up but what she gained from the invaluable experience of that major senior event in the winter of 2013.
Next week Marincu will return to Sweden as a gold medal favourite and one of the most talented teenagers in world athletics.
Back in Gothenburg, she was still only 16. Two years on, she is now on her way to the European Athletics Junior Championships in Eskilstuna held from 16-19 July, as a senior medallist, let alone the top youngster in her event.
Marincu, who was 19 in April, had led the European Athletics junior rankings with a leap of 6.55m from May but then at the weekend in Itesti in Romania, she jumped even further with 6.66m to easily win the Balkan Junior Championships with her closest rival, Türkiye’s Hasibe Serenay Fil, in second with 5.77m.
It was a performance that took Marincu into the overall European top 20, but that should be no surprise because she is used to doing more than just mixing it with the elder women in her event.
A few months after Gothenburg, Marincu won gold in both the long jump and triple jump at the IAAF World Youth Championships in Donetsk before she truly announced herself when she returned to the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Prague last March.
What a stunning progression she had made. This time, instead of one jump from three, she was a different character, with a qualifying programme of 6.57m, 6.42m and then 6.57m again to finish fifth overall before the final where she entered European athletics history.
She had recorded distances of 6.70m, 6.59m and 6.60m before the fifth round where she leaped to 6.79m, a European junior record and the bronze medal as Serbia’s Ivana Spanovic won with 6.98m and Germany’s Sosthene Taroum Moguenara was second with 6.83m.
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Equally significant was that Marincu had overtaken France’s Eloyse Lesueur, the outdoor European champion who went on to retain that title in Zurich later in the year. She was fifth in Prague in 6.73m.
Eskilstuna could be the perfect opportunity for Marincu to extend her outdoor personal best and once again demonstrated her dominance versus athletes of her own age.