Spain’s Playas de Castellon and Italy's Audacia Record Atletica came out on top at the European Champion Clubs Cup Junior Group A match in the Spanish town of Castellon on Saturday.
The men’s pre-event favourites Castellon, obviously helped by home advantage, defended the title they won 12 months ago in Bydgoszcz but only by the very slimmest of margins.
The hosts and the Turkish club Fenerbahce Spor Kulubu both had totals of 103 points, and seven individual victories each, and so the deciding factor came down to the Spanish team having more second place finishes, five to three for their rivals, which enabled them to take the trophy for the second year in succession.
British club Shaftesbury Barnet Harriers were third with 83 points.
The three performers in the men's competition to particularly impress were the Spanish triple jumper Vicente Docavo, who came from behind in the last round to win with a wind-assisted 15.46m with his Turkish opponent MusaTuzen holding pole position with 15.42m; Spanish hammer thrower Pedro José Martín, who achieved 69.81m in the second round, his only legal throw of the competition; and Slovenia's 2011 European Athletics Junior Championships 800m silver medallist Zan Rudolf, competing for AD Mass Ljubljana, who won very comfortably over two laps of the track and crossed the line nearly three seconds clear of the rest of the field in 1:49.84.
One surprise was another European junior champion in Tallinn, Spain's 5000m and 10000m winner Gabriel Navarro, finishing second in the 3000m behind Britain's Richard Goodman.
After a sprint for the line down the home straight, Goodman finished in 8:19.60 with Navarro behind him in 8:19.90.
Audacia Record Atletica had a lot more comfortable a victory in the women's competition totalling102.5 points to become the first Italian team ever to win the women's competition.
They finished ahead of 2011 winners Fenerbahce, who were second with 85 points, while Britain's Blackheath and Bromley Harriers were third with 81 points.
The big heroine for the Italian team was 18-year-old Dariya Derkach, who was originally from Ukraine but who is now waiting for Italian citizenship. She won the 100m hurdles and long jump with marks of 13.83 and 6.21m respectively and also helped her team get maximum points in the 4x100m relay with a strong anchor leg.
There two notable performances in the throws. Hungary's Krisztina Varadi, who was fifth in the discus at the 2011 European Athletics Junior Championships and on this occasion competing for the Serbian club AC Novi Beograd, threw her implement out to 50.26 and also won the shot.
Türkiye's 2011 European Athletics Junior Championships hammer silver medallist Kivilcim Kaya didn't get close to her junior national record of 66.74m that she achieved in Tallinn but got a respectable distance of 57.26m and her two other valid throws went or 56 metres, which would have been sufficient to win the competition.