Olympic champion Christoph Harting from Germany is the latest high-profile athlete to be confirmed for the ISTAF Indoor in Berlin, a European Athletics Indoor Premium Permit Meeting, on 14 February.
As has become customary in recent years, the discus will take centre stage at the end of the programme and the men and women will go head-to-head again in a special format which was successfully implemented last year. The competition was won twelve months ago by Nadine Muller who threw a world indoor best of 63.89m ahead of Austrian Lukas Weisshaidinger’s 63.09m.
Harting, who won at this meeting in 2017 with 63.84m, will be joined at the Mercedes Benz Arena by teammate and Olympic bronze medallist Daniel Jasinski, reigning German champion Martin Wierig and Romania’s Alin Alexandru Firfirica who finished fourth at the World Athletics Championships in Doha.
Muller will return in search of back-to-back wins in the German capital and she is accompanied by a strong triumvirate of Shanice Craft, Kristin Pudenz and Claudine Vita. “This was an absolute highlight for me. And the anticipation for that second duel is already huge,” said Muller on last year’s competition
The ISTAF Indoor takes place in just over two weeks’ time and the event looks set to be a sell-out. Only 300 of the 12,000 tickets which have been allocated for the event are yet to be sold.
Other standout names to be confirmed for the event include world champion Malaika Mihambo who makes her season’s debut in the long jump and world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie, Olympic champion Thiago Braz and two-time world medallist Piotr Lisek in the pole vault.