 |
| Great Britain's Phillips Idowu is also set to compete in Bydgoszcz on Friday at the first European Athletics Outdoor Premium Meeting of the year. |
The XI European Athletics Festival in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz will open this year’s series of European Athletics Outdoor Premium Meetings on Friday.
Among the athletes who will be on display will be three 2010 European Athletics Championships gold medallists, Poland’s Marcin Lewandowski, Great Britain’s Phillips Idowu and Slovakia’s Libor Charfreitag.
The highlight of the Bydgoszcz meeting for local fans is likely to be the 800m, the very last event on the programme, in which the current European outdoor champion Lewandowski will take on his rival and compatriot Adam Kszczot, who won at the 2011 European Athletics Indoor Championships.
The pair have made no secret of the fact that that if the conditions are good then they hope to get close to the long-standing Polish 800m record of 1:43.22, which has belonged to Pawel Czapiewski since 2001.
Czapiewski, now 33 and who will also be in the race on Friday, lost his Polish 1000m record to Kszczot on Tuesday night, when the latter clocked 2:16.99 to finish second in the Czech city of Ostrava and improve on the former’s mark by 23-hundredths-of-a-second.
Also racing over two laps of the track will be Bartosz Nowicki, fresh from winning over 1500m at the European Athletics Outdoor Premium Meetings in Dessau on Wednesday.
(A report on the Dessau meeting can be found here.
All four Polish runners, who will also have the meeting record of 1:45.21 in their sights, will be up against South Africa’s current world champion over two laps of the track Mbulaeni Mulaudzi.
Triple jump star Idowu should challenge his own meeting record of 17.36m, which he achieved three years ago, after leaping to a 2011 world-leading mark of 17.59m at the Samsung Diamond League meeting in Rome last week.
Among the current world champion’s rivals will be Karol Hoffman, who celebrated his 22nd birthday on Thursday. The son of the 1983 World Championships gold medallist Zdzislaw Hoffman will be looking to improve upon his recent personal best of 16.28m.
Also in the triple jump field will be Russia’s 2010 World Junior Championships gold medallist Aleksey Fyodorov, who showed he was in form when he went out to 17.01m at the Russian Team Championships in Sochi last week.
Barcelona hammer champion Charfreitag will face the in-form Hungary Krisztian Pars, who was third at the 2010 European Athletics Championships but who is one of only three men in the world to have gone over 80 metres in the event this year.
Also in the field will be the evergreen Szymon Zió…‚kowski, the 2000 Olympic Games champion and 2001 World Championships gold medallist, as well as Germany’s Markus Esser and Russia’s Sergey Litvinov, the fourth and sixth best men in the world this year.
The leading names in the men’s pole vault are Ukraine’s 2010 European Athletics Championships silver medallist Maksim Mazuryk and Russia’s 2008 Olympic Games silver medallist Yevgeniy Lukyanenko.
The latter set his personal best and the Bydgoszcz meeting record of 6.01m just a few weeks before he climbed the podium in Beijing.
The pair will face Russia’s Alexandr Gripich, fifth at the 2009 World Championships but who no-heighted at the 2010 European Athletics Championships, who won the pole vault at the European Champion Clubs Cup in Portugal on Sunday with 5.60m.
The men’s 110m hurdles will see The Bahamas’ current world champion Ryan Brathwaite up against Hungary’s Daniel Kiss, the 2010 European Athletics Championships bronze medallist.
The top women’s event could be the discus, which sees Russia’s 2004 Olympic Games champion and two-time European Athletics Championships medallist Nataliya Sadova up against local Polish stars Zaneta Glanc and Wioletta Potepa.
The meeting in Bydgoszcz is the first of nine 2011 European Athletics Outdoor Premium Meetings that will be held in the coming months.
Further details of all the 2011 European Athletics Outdoor Premium Meetings can be found here.