The value of a podium, the athletes say, is defined by the athletes with whom you share it, and Jesús Gómez, a farmer from Burgos who wants so much to return and see his land already green, the cereal already planted sprouting in the harsh winter, before Jakob Ingebrigtsen, a 22-year-old Norwegian, champion of all the championships, Olympic, world, and 10 times European champion in all distances and 10 times European champion in all distances and terrain, the 1,500m, the 3,000m, the 5,000m and the cross. In Istanbul, Gómez, who is springing up this winter like his durum wheat after a year injured, was unable to reach his third podium with the Norwegian boy. He finished fourth (3m 38.11s), “rowing”, he says, so they wouldn’t catch up with him after trying to catch up with the train that formed after the speedy Nordic from the first meter, opened up a gap with almost everyone and never left the track
And, happy in these types of races, so linear, Gómez spoke admiring the Norwegian, whom he calls the king, and the pleasure he almost felt watching him run, “a luxury hare”, even though it crushes him, his way of progressing in the lead , of accelerating imperceptibly but tremendously, and the suffering that he inflicts on those who follow him closest, the Scotsman Neil Gourley, who has run in 3m 32.58s this winter and has a tremendous kick, a kick that he releases at 180 meters thinking that he will knock down Ingebrigtsen, and he hits the air, because the energy in the Norwegian who doesn’t get bored rolling hours and hours on the mechanical tapestry of Sierra Nevada seems to flow from a bottomless, inexhaustible well. Ingebrigtsen resists Gourley’s change and changes even more in the final stretch and wins by beating (3m 33.95s, and hare himself), the championship record. Gourley finishes in 3m 34.23s and the third, Azeddine Habz, the Frenchman Gómez cannot beat, in 3m 35.39s.
Bestué, first Spanish 60m finalist
Locked in the call room half an hour before, oppressive heat, nervous sweating, fleeing looks, half an hour before Jaël Bestué suffers, she says, because it is difficult for her to concentrate, to focus on the race, to visualize the seven seconds and a little, start, first supports, already straightened, launched, of the 60-meter race as in the conservatory she visualized her fingers on the keys of the piano or the keys of the saxophone. “And for this reason, because it is difficult for me to focus, to control so many impulses, perhaps at the start I am not as I should be,” says the sprinter, and in the Medicine room, from Sant Cugat, who suffered in the morning series to finish in 7.30s, 11 hundredths worse than his best mark, and that in the afternoon semifinal, again a slow start (167 thousandths, the slowest of the eight), he qualified for the final. “I am happy because I have known, at least to run relaxed, without twitching and to progress, because what a disaster to start”. She is 22 years old. She is the first Spanish 60m finalist in history, a milestone, and there she, Ricardo Diéguez’s pupil, one of them, fought with the European queens of the shortest distance, speed bombs, the Swiss Mujinga Kambundji (7 00s), the Polish Ewa Swoboda (7.09s) and the British Daryll Neita (7.12s). She, eighth (7.26s).
Marta Pérez, seventh in 3,000m
By calculations whose ingredients only the European federation knows, there was no rest day between the semifinal and final of the women’s 3,000m (while those of the 800m were allowed to free play yesterday), in which Konstanze Klosterhalfen (KK), the apparently fragile, and almost anorexic airs, a 25-year-old German long-distance runner, faithful to her custom, played the spectacular hare for another to win. Capable of mechanically and tirelessly chaining thousands at 2m 50s and unable to change gears, KK led her compatriot Hanna Klein until she said goodbye with 150 meters to go to win with a personal best (8m 35.87s) in a race that they all lived like an agony. Klosterhalfen achieved her third silver medal and Marta Pérez from Soriana, the best of the Spanish women, finished seventh (8m 49.19s), while Marta García from Leon was tenth (8m 54.92s), three places ahead of the local heroine , Emine Hatun Mechaal, a native of Antakya, the Antioch of the Romans, destroyed and martyred by the earthquake just a month ago, and applauded like nobody else.
spindles, finalist
From the depression of the 1940s, the injuries suffered by Cañal and Guijarro, his bad morning series that sentenced him to Calle 4, and he thanks fortune because it could have been the third, Óscar Husillos emerges with a smile and a hint of pride in the semifinals, a quick start to take second place in the open lane, behind the KW locomotive (Karsten Warholm -“a friend, a colleague, a rival”, he describes it–, which runs free and powerful (45.43s) and a sin of relaxation in the last straight line, and because of that the Belgian Julien Watrin puts his head in, ahead of him by four hundredths, breaks his country’s record (45.82s) and condemns the Astudillo Express, third (45, 86s) to another unwanted draw, the one that decides if the final (today, 18.20) will be run on the street by one or two, dead end mousetraps. Four of the finalists fell below 46s in the semi, and Husillos remembered, to praise the great level of the test, which he ran in 46.02s when he won the European Championship two years ago.”Running at current rates, 21.2s-21.3s on 20 0, on these streets with sharp curves it will be very difficult”, says the sprinter from Palencia. “But I am where I wanted to be. I came to defend my title and that’s what I’ll do in the final”.
Nafissatou Thiam world record
He ran the 60m hurdles in 8.23s; she jumped 1.92m in height and 6.59m in length; he threw the weight at 15.54m and finished the 800m, looking almost like perfectly preserved lettuce in the fridge, so fresh, in 2m 13.60s. she was not a superwoman, Or maybe yes, the one who did it yesterday in just 12 hours in the Ataköy pavilion, but a Belgian athlete named Nafissatou Thiam, 28, double Olympic and world heptathlon champion: 5,055 points. Pentathlon world record two weeks after American Anna Hall reached 5,001 she became, with 5,004 points, the first woman to pass 5,000 in eight years.
The previous world record, 5,013 points, was held by the Ukrainian Nataliya Dobrinska, who achieved it at the 2012 World Cups, also in Istanbul. And the second classified in the European, the Polish Adrianna Sulek (5,014 points) also surpassed, by a single point, the world record of the Ukraine.
In the triple jump, the Portuguese Pedro Pablo Pichardo, Olympic, world and European champion, won with 17.60m, surpassing by one centimeter the best world mark of the year that the Spanish Jordan Díaz set two weeks ago.
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