It is just 3 days until the start of the European Athletics Indoor Championships and as part of our extensive coverage we are looking back on some of the great moments from its glorious history.
Never has a gold medallist been more wretched.
Renaud Lavillenie, France’s reigning Olympic pole vault champion, cleared 6.01m to win his third consecutive European indoor title at Gothenburg’s Scandinavium Arena in 2013.
But at the end of the competition he sank onto the track in despair after what he had been convinced was a successful last-attempt clearance of 6.07m – four centimetres further than his best and closer than any other man had managed to get to Sergey Bubka’s 1993 indoor and absolute world record of 6.15m – was ruled ineligible.
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As Lavillenie, distraught, hid his face in his hands, and while the photographers and TV cameras were drawn towards him despite the fact that the women’s 60m final was about to start, the bar remained mockingly intact on its supports above him.
No wonder the Frenchman had raved with frustration and thundered a mighty kick of rage into the hoardings before subsiding in disbelief. He later accepted his victor’s bouquet as if it were infested with greenfly, hurling it swiftly over the barriers. “I am very sad about the rules,” he said afterwards. “Everyone saw that the bar was still up.”
Lavillenie was right – but as officials later explained, in clearing the bar he had shifted it further than was admissible. The International Association of Athletics Federation regulation which operated in this case was Rule 182.2.a. It states that a vault shall be declared ineligible if “the bar does not remain on both pegs because of the action of the athlete”.
Cold comfort indeed for Lavillenie, who had erupted out of the pit for the second successive time after his earlier celebration of the 6.01m clearance which had effectively done for the challenge of his perennial runner-up over the last two years, Germany’s Bjorn Otto.
Less than a year later, Lavillenie would set an indoor and absolute world record of 6.16m as he broke Bubka’s longstanding best mark. He wasn’t to know that then, however…
The German, too, had reason to feel frustrated given that he would be the Olympic, European, world indoor and European indoor champion today – were it not for Lavillenie, who added a fourth European indoor title in Prague two years later but has, sadly, been denied a defence of his title in Belgrade through injury.
Pole vault:
Renaud Lavillenie (FRA) 6.01m
Bjorn Otto (GER) 5.76m
Malte Mohr (GER) 5.76m
Top 3 from Prague:
Renaud Lavillenie (FRA) 6.04m
Aleksandr Gripich (RUS) 5.85m
Piotr Lisek (POL) 5.85m
Championship Record: Renaud Lavillenie (FRA) 6.04m, Prague/CZE - 07.03.2015
European Indoor Record: Renaud Lavillenie (FRA) 6.16m, Donetsk/UKR - 15.02.2014