The European Teams Championship – runblogrun

Stuart Weir is our European senior author, and that is the intro to a sequence on the 2023 European Workforce Championships. 

The European Groups Championship

The European Groups Championship is a straightforward idea.  Every European Nation enters one athlete in every self-discipline, and staff factors are awarded in accordance with the place athletes end of their particular person occasions.  The occasion has developed over time from separate males’s and girls’s to a mixed competitors which is now’s now contested in three divisions.

This will probably be my fifth time attending the occasion. Poland is (double) defending champions, having received in 2021 and 2019. Germany received in 2013, 2015, and 2017. GB’s finest latest end was third in 2021.  Profitable the competitors displays not simply the energy in depth of the nation’s staff but additionally the nation’s capability to steer the highest athletes to participate, as there isn’t any prize cash. Ekaterina Stefanidi instructed me in 2019 that she loved representing her nation, however “I’m an expert athlete, and I ought to be paid.” Laborious to argue with that view. That Poland is internet hosting the occasion for a 3rd time in 4 years and has received the earlier 2 is a sign that Polish Athletics takes the competitors significantly and that Polish athletes help it, undoubtedly delighted to have the possibility to compete in entrance of a house and vociferous crowd.

The 2023 Poland staff consists of two particular person European champions from Munich final yr in Pia Skrzyszowska (100m hurdles) and Wojciech Nowicki (hammer). Different world-class performers embrace Femke Bol, Miltiadis Tentoglou, Simon Ehammer, Pedro Pichardo, 

In whole, 11 particular person European champions from Munich will probably be competing in Silesia. Different European champions in motion on the lads’s facet embrace Italy’s Yemaneberhan Crippa (5000m), Finland’s Topi Raitanen (3000m steeplechase), Portugal’s (triple bounce), Jessica Schilder and Wilma Murto.

The 16 nations within the first division are Poland, Italy, Nice Britain & NI, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, and Norway.

Division 1 is a three-day occasion, Friday to Sunday.