On a cool and wet evening in Tallinn, the Germans burned up the track in the women’s 100m final with gold and silver going to good friends and roommates Rebekka Haase and Alexandra Burghardt.
Haase was the fastest by nearly three-tenths in yesterday’s heats with 11.25 but this was not an evening for fast times. She left it late but the pre-event favourite came through for the title in 11.47 to emulate Verena Sailer, the last German winner of this title eight years ago.
Burghardt claimed the silver medal in 11.54 with European junior champion Stella Akakpo taking bronze for France in 11.55.
It was a busy evening for Haase, who also qualified fastest for the 200m final with a season’s best of 23.14. A second gold medal could be on the cards, but Haase has already surpassed her expectations.
“My only goal was to get into the finals,” said Haase modestly. “To win a medal is a great joy. The weather was horrible with the rain, but the time doesn’t matter for me.”
Just as Haase and Burghardt crossed the finish-line in the 100m, Fabian Heinle received the gold medal he won from the men’s long jump final.
In a high-calibre competition, Heinle stamped his authority on the event in the fifth round with an unmatched effort of 8.14m to defeat Czech Republic’s Radek Juska (8.00m) and Georgia’s Bachana Khorava (7.97m).
In total, four of the top seven finishers came away with lifetime bests.
The runway in Tallinn is renowned as a quick one, and the results in the triple jump further confirmed this. Dovile Dzindzaletaite set a wind-aided 14.23m to extend her lead in the second round before replicating that mark in legal conditions two rounds later to extend her Lithuanian record by two centimetres.
In the pole vault, Sweden took a one-two as predicted with former European junior champion Angelica Bengtsson winning with a first-time clearance of 4.55m by five centimetres ahead of Michaela Meijer.
The women’s 20km walk didn’t go to the script with little-known Russian Mariya Ponomaryova upsetting the highly-rated Czech Anezka Drahotova.
But as a mark of Drahotova’s ability, Ponomaryova had to pull off a championship record to deny the pre-event favourite. The Russian, who arrived in Tallinn with a personal best of 1:30:17, slashed exactly three minutes from that mark to claim the title.
With times of 1:27:17 and 1:27:25 respectively, Ponomaryova and Drahotova both ducked under the previous championship record of 1:28:48 set by Tatyana Shemykina in 2007.
The first championship record of the day was achieved in the morning session by Alexandra Tavernier from France in the hammer qualifying.
The conditions improved for the second pool of throwers, and Tavernier took full advantage. With her first throw, the former world junior champion launched the hammer out to 72.98m to improve the championship record by more than a metre.
In the 100m hurdles, the standard was set by Switzerland’s Noemi Zbaren, who won her heat by more than half-a-second in 13.00. In the semi-final, Zbaren went even faster as she equalled the championship record of 12.88.
From the shortest event on the track to the longest, Italy’s Giovanni Galbieri won the men’s 100m in 10.33 by 0.01 from Denis Dimitrov of Bulgaria, while Jip Vastenburg outsprinted Rhona Auckland for gold in the women’s 10,000m in 32:18.69.
Nick Miller became the first Brit to claim the European under-23 hammer title with his second-round throw of 74.46m while Romania’s Alin Alexandru Firfirica produced his best mark of 60.64m in the second round to win gold in the discus.
In the heptathlon, Xenia Krizsan consolidated her overnight lead to claim the title for Hungary. Her season’s best of 49.78m in the javelin was her standout performance en route to an overall tally of 6303.