Guenther Weidlinger of Austria is the European Athlete of the Month for November.

European Athletics is pleased to announce that Guenther Weidlinger of Austria and Portugal's Ana Dulce Felix have been selected as the European Athletes of the Month for November.

Weidlinger pulled off a huge surprise to beat Olympic Marathon champion Sammy Wanjiru of Kenya at the Great Australian Run, a 15km road race, in Melbourne.

The list of casualties in Melbourne included the likes of 2004 Athens Olympic Games Marathon champion Stefano Baldini of Italy and Spain's former European 10000m champion Jose Manuel Martinez.

The win came just five weeks after Weidlinger's national Marathon record in Frankfurt. The 31-year-old finished 10th in 2:10:47 but managed to break the 23-year-old national record of Gerhard Hartmann by one minute and 52 seconds.

Weidlinger holds every national record from the 1500m to the Marathon.

After a distinguished career on the track as a steeplechaser that included reaching the Olympic finals in Beijing, Weidlinger started with the Marathon only in April on his home turf in Vienna. He is now confident of a good showing at next year's European Athletics Championships in Barcelona, Spain.

Felix on the other hand was the most consistent of the strong battery of Portuguese Cross Country runners. The 27-year-old, who was the best among European finishers at the World Cross Country Championships, won two European Athletics Cross Country permit races in Tillburg and Roeselaere during the month of November.

She won the 6.43km course at Lotto CrossCup van West-Vlaanderen, in Roeselaere, Belgium, with a time of 23.22 and the 8.1km circuit at the Warandeloop meet in Tillburg, Netherlands, in 27.34.

Spaniard Alemayehu Bezabeh and Iaroslav Musinschi of Moldova followed Weidlinger in the men's poll while the Russian duo of Inga Abitova and Lyudmila Petrova were voted likewise in the women's polls.

The European Athlete of the Month initiative was launched in January 2007 and is designed to recognise outstanding performers at all levels of the sport in Europe.  

European Athletics names a male and female winner each month and features the athlete on the European Athletics website. Selections are based on votes by the public, the media and a panel of European Athletics experts, with each counting for 33.3 percent of the final vote.

Consistency pays for Ana Dulce Felix of Portugal.

No athlete who has previously served a two-year doping ban can be nominated for or win the European Athlete of the Month.

Previous Winners:

Month	Male	Country	Female	Country
October	Mo Farah	GBR	Inês Monteiro	POR
September	Primož Kozmus	SLO	Blanka Vlašić	CRO
July	Tomasz Majewski	POL	Marta Domínguez	ESP
June	Renaud Lavillenie	FRA	Ariane Friedrich	GER
May	Nelson Évora	POR	Jessica Ennis	GBR
April	Gerd Kanter	EST	Irina Mikitenko	GER
March	Sebastian Bayer	GER	Ariane Friedrich	GER
February	Yelena Isinbayeva	RUS	Ivan Ukhov	RUS
January	Mo Farah	GBR	Blanka Vlasic	CRO