Multistars 2019: Review
The roll of honour at the Multistars meeting over the last 32 editions includes famous winners such as Robert Zmelik, Dmitriy Karpov, Andrei Krauchanka and Eelco Sintnicolaas. This weekend Jan Doležal became the first name on that list to win the Trofeoi Zerneri Acciai honour at the new venue of Lana, with a personal best of 8117.
Doležal’s score included a few events that were below marks of which he was capable, and so the Doha World Championships qualifying mark of 8200 cannot be too far away for him. And that will be the case for others in the field too. While Jan was the only athlete over 8000, as far as eight events into the competition the simulations predicted that five men would score over 8000, even considering the relatively slow 100m times affected by a strong headwind, and some modest pole vault heights. Overall, scores were affected by the cold, windy conditions on day two, contrasting starkly with the warm sunshine of day one.
The Decathlonpedia preview of the event highlighted the form of the Estonian team in the indoor season, and that form was clear in this first major meeting of the year as Kristjan Rosenberg delivered an excellent second place, also with a personal best of 7950 points. From the shot onwards, Rosenberg and Doležal were never lower than fourth place overall, and tracked each other consistently throughout the competition, swapping places in first and second position. The Estonians came into the competition with eight indoor personal bests from 2019 between them – and left with eleven outdoor bests.
And Risto Lillemets and Jean Baptiste Nutte had their breakthrough competitions, Risto steadily climbing up the leaderboard over the course of two days to ultimately finish in sixth (7707), and Jean Baptiste (7554) in the top eight right up until the last event. Yuma Maruyama also enjoyed a good competition, finishing seventh overall (7613).
Martin Roe continued where he had left off at the top of the podium in Firenze in 2018 and finished first in the 100 (11.03), long jump (7.44) and then the discus (47.26) on day two, ultimately placing fourth overall (7915). The German duo did not feature quite as much as we might have expected, only starting to gain ground overnight, starting with Mathias Brugger’s 400 (48.16)and Tim Nowak’s pole vault (4.85), and rounding off with a strong 1-2 in the 1500m, which carried Brugger into third place (7927) at the end of ten events and Nowak fifth (7884).
Returning to the competition simulations, Brazilian participants Luiz Alberto de Araujo and Jefferson Santos were both tipped for scores over 8000 but would not have been helped by the cold weather, and Santos had an unfortunate no-height in the pole vault. De Araujo finished in tenth place overall (7492). While generally the simulations were a little optimistic at the top end of the table and underestimated the anticipated performance of the under-23 athletes, in fact they were pretty accurate in predicting Doležal’s and Rosenberg’s final scores, emphasising the relative strength of their performance. The Decathlonpedia simulator, last seen in Glasgow, is currently having a spell of warm weather training in Finland preparing for the outdoor season and will be back soon.
The Decathlonpedia team had some mixed fortunes, but ultimately with promising progress. Preview cover stars Doležal and Marek Lukáš (who had the highest mark of 64.94 in the javelin, and 7589 overall) both finished in the top eight. Adam had a good long jump (7.29), shot (15.25) and high jump (2.01) and is on his way back to the form we know. Reinis appeared to be on a roll during the high jump (1.98), but his progress was interrupted by a slight injury – nothing serious but he took the decision to withdraw ahead of the hurdles to avoid further damage.
Finally, you can find the Decathlonpedia team’s photos and videos from Italy as they are uploaded onto our Multistars competition homepage; and you can find all the results from Multistars here.
Photo: Radek Juška
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