Yuri Borzakovskiy
Russia has topped the medal table at the last three European Athletics Championships and two years ago in Barcelona they got a haul of 24 medals that included 10 titles.
Consequently, it’s a sure bet that Russian athletes will feature prominently at this year’s Championships in Helsinki, which will take be staged between 27 June – 1 July, and Russia’s head coach Valentin Maslakov named the first athletes to have secured their place on the team on Tuesday.
“Yuri Borzakovsky and Irina Davydova will go to the European Athletics Championships. Yana Borodina should be there and Yekaterina Konova,” said Maslakov, speaking in the wake of some outstanding results at the Russian Team Championships in Sochi at the weekend.
The rest of the Russian team going to Helsinki will be decided immediately after the Znamensky Memorial meeting in Zhukovsky on 17 June, a European Athletics Outdoor Classic Meeting. “We will send a strong team to these Championships,” added Maslakov.
Borzakovskiy, the 2004 Olympic Games 800m champion, has twice won European 800m titles indoors, he has never won a medal over two laps of the track at the European Athletics Championships, although he was part of the Russia’s 4x400m silver medal winning quartet in 2002.
Davydova ran a world-leading 400m hurdles time of 53.87 in Sochi on Sunday, a massive improvement on the previous best of 55.48 for the 2011 World University Games silver medallist.
Borodina, the 2011 European Athletics Junior Championships triple jump gold medallist, also set a personal best on Sunday when she bounded out to 14.41m while her fellow triple jumper Konova was second in Sochi with 14.31m.
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