Istanbul is hosting the 2023 European Athletics Indoor Championships – the oldest major international indoor championships in the world.
It will be the very first time Istanbul hosts the championship after the country’s successful staging of the 2012 World Athletics Indoor Championships at the same venue.
More than 600 athletes from 51 European countries are expected to compete in the refurbished Ataköy Arena between 2-5 March 2023.
Some of the renowned European athletics stars are gearing up for the event.
A large part of the European national indoor championships prior to İstanbul 2023 took place during the weekend of 18-19 February. The highlight of these championships was Femke Bol, who broke the 40-year-old world record in 400m.
“I was hoping to run the record, of course, but in life you hope for a lot of things and most of the time it does not happen,” Bol said at the Dutch Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn.
This was the 22-year-old Bol’s last race before the Istanbul 2023 European Athletics Indoor Championships between 2 and 5 March.
At the Polish Indoor Championships in Torun, Natalia Kaczmarek improved the 400m national record with 50.83, whereas the pentathlon winner Adriana Sulek added 9 more points to the former record with a dashing 4860. Ewa Swoboda, one of the favourites for women’s 60m at Euro Indoors, won the national championship by clocking 7.10.
At the Spanish Indoor Athletics Championships in Madrid, Oscar Husillos broke the men’s 400m national record with 45.58. Other national record setters were Enrique Llopis in the 60m hurdles race with 7.48, and Jordan Diaz with a 17.59m in men’s triple jump.
As Milica Gardasevic won the national women’s long jump championship with 6.90m at the Serbian Indoors in Belgrade, Ivana Vuleta came in second with 6.81m. In Greece, Emmanuel Karalis set the men’s pole vault national record by leaping to 5.86m.
British National Indoor Athletics Championships were held in Birmingham. While the 60 meters winners were Reese Prescod (6.5) and Daryll Neita (7.17), in Italy, Samuele Ceccarelli ran a personal best of 6.54 seconds in the final and pushed Olympic gold-medallist Marcel Jacobs to the second place by a margin of 0.01 seconds.
For more information and program about the 2023 European Athletics Indoor Championships visit https://www.istanbul2023.org/
