It is one of the biggest athletics weekends of the year – and the stars will be out in force.
The beautiful Estonian capital of Tallinn plays host to the annual European Athletics Convention and European Athletics Awards Night, where the 2013 European Athletes of the Year and Rising Stars will be announced.
The 250 confirmed guests of the Convention include some of the biggest names in the sport, and among them will be two of Estonia’s finest track and field competitors.
At the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000, Erki Nool turned himself into a national hero when he won the decathlon gold medal with a magnificent performance.
Now a member of the European Athletics Council, Nool’s glory in Australia was one of three gold medals he won in his career – the other two being the European Athletics decathlon title in Budapest in 1998 and the European Athletics indoor heptathlon crown in Stockholm two years earlier.
He will be joined this weekend by fellow Estonian Gerd Kanter, who won the discus world title in 2007 and then took Olympic Games gold the following year in Beijing.
Both are set to make an appearance at the Awards Night.
Great Britain’s Sebastian Coe, the double Olympic 1500m champion and chairman of the London 2012 Olympics, and Ukraine’s multiple pole vault world champion and world record-holder Sergey Bubka, who are both IAAF vice-Presidents, will be in Tallinn too.
And working for their national federations will be a series for former champions.
There will be Italy’s Olympic marathon champion Stefano Baldini, the Czech Republic’s decathlon world champion Tomas Dvorak, and Romania’s Olympic 5000m champion Gabriela Szabo.
It is more than 26 years since Armenian Robert Emmiyan leaped 8.86m to break the European long jump record, a mark that still stands today. He will be in Tallinn along with Alain Blondel, the Frenchman who won the European decathlon title in Helsinki in 1994.
The Convention, designed to better support European Athletics Member Federations, offering opportunities for education, networking and socialising, along with the usual meetings and calendar planning activities, runs 10-12 October.
The programme of events can be found here.
Saturday night will see the highly-anticipated Awards Night – with the winners announced in the categories of male and female European Athlete of the Year and male and female Rising Star.
Estonian Television (ETV) will have an hour-long programme from 19:10 local time that will be made available to European Broadcasting Union Members and also streamed live at http://otse.err.ee/etv/.
For the first time, European Athletics will not announce the winners until the evening of the Awards Night. All four winners of the men's and women's European Athlete of the Year and Rising Star awards will be present in Tallinn to collect their prizes.
More than 16,000 fans voted on the European Athlete of the Year and Rising Star Awards at www.facebook.com/EuropeanAthletics, while 163 members of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS) from 54 countries also voted through www.aipsmedia.com.