Six months after they celebrated their Golden Tracks awards in Funchal as European athletes of the year, Olympic champions Ruth Beitia and Nafissatou Thiam will be chasing gold on the same stage together in Belgrade.
As high jumper Beitia was today named in the Spanish team for the European Athletics Indoor Championships which start on Friday next week, Belgium multi-event star Thiam confirmed she will compete in the pentathlon in Serbia.
Beitia will be seeking her sixth medal at these championships, having won gold in Gothenburg in 2013 to go with her four silvers and a bronze in a career where she celebrated Olympic glory last summer, at the age of 37, just weeks after completing a European hat-trick in Amsterdam.
Beitia was fifth in Prague in 2015 but her desire for more medals goes on. She won silver last March at the IAAF World Indoor Championships before her amazing summer which success led to her being named as European Athletics’ Female Athlete of 2016.
She was honoured on the awards night along with Thiam, 22, who won the female Rising Star title for her amazing performance to take Olympic heptathlon gold and beat defending and world champion Jessica Ennis-Hill.
Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam has confirmed she will contest the pentathlon at the European Indoor Champs in Belgrade. pic.twitter.com/fVewDQC8qQ
— European Athletics (@EuroAthletics) February 21, 2017
Thiam competes in Belgrade two years after she won pentathlon silver with a personal best of 4696 points as Britain’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson won with a championship record of 5000.
Individually, Thiam is having another brilliant season, running a 60m hurdles personal best of 8.37 in Gent last Saturday after her furthest ever shot put – indoors or out – of 15.35m in Paris earlier in the month which sets her up perfectly for the one-day pentathlon on Friday 3 March.
Beitia will also be in action on the opening day of the championships in the qualifying competition and she will be in a Spanish team of 34, which includes triple jumper Pablo Torrijos, who won European indoor silver in Prague with a national record of 17.04m.
Spain have a strong look throughout, with Olympic 110m silver medallist Orlando Ortega one of their big hopes.
He has had a superb winter in the 60m hurdles, with a national record of 7.48m in Torun earlier this month to sit second on the European rankings behind Great Britain’s world No. 1 Andrew Pozzi (7.43).
Their men’s 3000m squad is packed with strength, too, led by Adel Mechaal, a Euro Cross team gold medallist. He is joined by multiple junior and under-23 Euro Cross silver medallist Carlos Mayo and Jordi Torrents.
In the 800m, Kevin Lopez (1:46.58 this season) will look to stop Poland’s Adam Kszczot (1:46.17) winning his third Euro Indoor gold. The Spaniard is second behind him in the European rankings and their tussle should be thrilling, while it will be a similar story in the men’s 400m as Spain's European No. 2 Oscar Husillos (45.92) faces Pavel Maslak (45.80), the Czech Republic's defending champion who is going for three golds in a row.
The full Spanish squad can be found at www.rfea.es/web/noticias/desarrollo.asp?codigo=9688#.WKwb7Ricb6b