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| Great Britain's Holly Bleasdale eased through to the finals of the pole vault with an impressive performance on Friday morning. |
A summary of the morning session on Day 2 of the Ostrava 2011 European Athletics U23 Championships on Friday.
Tom Erling Kårbø won the first heat of the steeplechase in a personal best 8:42.40, but in third, 8:23 performer Sebastian Martos of Spain, looked ominously easy. The second heat was run at a much livelier pace giving eight men the chance to qualify for Sunday’s final. Poland’s Lukasz Oslizlo raced away from the field to clock a career best 8:38.28 while the top six in race two qualified for the final, including season leader, Abdelaziz Merzougui of France.
All three Russian medal favorites qualified for tomorrow morning’s 110m hurdles semi-finals with ease. As expected, though, Britain’s Laurence Clarke got amongst them on times by equalling Aleksey Dryomin’s 13.73 for joint fastest. Season leader, Konstantin Shabanov and Sergey Shubenkov were the other heat winners. A curiosity was the increasing head-wind varying from 0.3 for the first heat rising to -1.4 by the time of the fourth heat.
In the high jump, season pacesetters, Sergey Mudrov and Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko went through without mishap. A surprise casualty was 2.22 performer, Britain’s David Smith, who managed no higher than 2.08.
After the high hurdles, Adam Sebastian Helcelet of the Czech Republic slipped into a 19-point lead in the decathlon following a lifetime best 14.35. Eduard Mikhan was so nervous at finding himself in the lead after day one that he clearly twitched before the gun - this, though, was put down to a technical fault - before then committing a false start at the second time of asking. Eventually, he won his heat in 14.80, well outside his best, but held his head in his hands as he crossed the line at his near-death experience. “I wasn’t expecting to be in the gold medal position and I could smell gold,” he said by way of explanation for his attack of nerves. Third overall, Kai Kazmierek of Germany, stands 33 points down on Helcelet. Spare a thought for pre-tournament favourite, Jan Felix Knobel of Germany, who crashed out of the hurdles and any hope of a medal.
Knobel regained some measure of pride in the discus, going out to an event leading 49.09PB to haul himself up to 17th. Up front meanwhile, Mikhan regained the lead with 44.54 for a total of 5881, a lead over Mihail Dudas of Serbia of 58 points with Helcelet slipping to third, 119 points adrift of the Belarussian.
Holly Bleasdale of Great Britain and Annika Roloff of Germany enjoyed clean scorecards for an untroubled passage to the pole vault final on Sunday. Season leader Bleasdale, who came in at 4.05, only took three jumps compared to the German’s five. Her ambition is to set new figures in the final, which means beating her best of 4.70 and thereby erasing the championship record of 4.65 held by Yelena Isinbayeva no less.
Eight out of the 12 finalists for this evening’s gold-medal battle in the women’s shot needed only one throw to get over the 15.50m qualification tape. Germany’s Sophie Kleeberg achieved 17.39 to head the contenders, while season’s leader, Yevgeniya Kolodko of Russia lay second with 16.97. Down in 10th was Denmark’s Trine Mulbjerg who set a national record 15.46, the only qualifier to set a lifetime best.
Bianca Perie of Romania came out on top of the hammer qualifiers with a distance of 69.91at the first time of asking. Second was Poland’s Joanna Fiodorow who threw two metres further than ever before, the implement hitting the turf at 68.97.