The European Indoor Athletics Championships begin on Thursday at the Ataköy Arena in Istanbul, Turkey, with the most important competitions taking place over the weekend. Competing in 26 different events are over 50 countries and more than 600 male and female athletes, and among the set reigning Olympic champions is the sprinter Marcell Jacobs, the most awaited of the 49 Italians.
Indoor activity is a minor and often rather neglected part of athletics: its winter version, preparatory and preparatory to the rest of the outdoor season. However, it is interesting for its peculiarities and differences with respect to outdoor athletics: hammers, discs or javelins are not thrown – for quite understandable reasons; the 100 meters become 60 meters and since the track is shorter, other speed and middle-distance races also change, if not in terms of length in certain dynamics.
Above all, however, indoor competitions have the advantage of not having to depend on heat or cold, rain or wind, thus offering athletes much less variable conditions. There are also specialties that are not greatly influenced by being indoors or outdoors, or that are negatively affected, not being able to enjoy any favorable winds. This is the case with jumps: high, long, triple and pole vault. In all these specialties it is even irrelevant that a certain record is made indoors rather than outdoors.
(PHOTO: JULIEN CROSNIER / DPPI)
The current absolute world record in the women’s triple jump (15 meters and 72 centimeters) was set indoors, in March 2022, by Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas. The same goes for the men’s pole vault record that Swedish Armand “Mondo” Duplantis set at the end of February, reaching 6 meters and 22 centimeters indoors. Shot put is also practiced indoors, which reaches much shorter distances than throws: the current men’s world record, recently established indoors, is 23 meters and 38 centimetres.
On the other hand, many things change for running races. While an outdoor lap is 400 meters long, in approved competitions an indoor lap is in fact equal to 200 metres.
This means above all that they don’t fit 100 straight meters, no curves. In indoor competitions, the most famous and spectacular athletics competition therefore gives way to an even shorter and more explosive one, in which starting and initial progression are even more important. In addition, the 60m and 60m hurdles events are held on a separate part of the track in the center of the arenas.
(PHOTO: PHILIPPE MILLEREAU / DPPI)
The men’s world record over 60 meters, a distance that was also Olympic on a couple of occasions at the beginning of the twentieth century, is 6 seconds and 34 hundredths of a second. AND been calculated that in his Olympic final Jacobs reached 60 meters in 6 seconds and 41 cents, and that for his world record over 100 meters (coursed in 2009, with a little wind in his favour, in 9 seconds and 58 cents) the Jamaican Usain Bolt reached 60 meters in 6 seconds and 31 cents: in fact, while he set the 100-metre record, he also set the 60-metre record, which however obviously could not be considered as an official record.
It also seems that there was at least one other sprinter capable of going from 60 meters, while running for 100, in an even shorter time. It is the Chinese Su Bingtian, who in the semifinals of the Tokyo Olympics was faster than Jacobs and took only 6 seconds and 29 cents to reach 60 metres. Indoors, on the effective 60 metres, however, he never managed to go below 6 seconds and 40 cents.
At the European Championships in Istanbul Jacobs arrives as Olympic champion on the 100m and as world champion on the 60m; but among the others to challenge him there will be the twenty-two year old Samuele Ceccarelli, who on 60 meters has recently beaten him in the Italian indoor championships.
The other distances raced at the European Championships these days, and in general at every indoor event, are the 400 meters (also raced in relays), the 800, 1,500 and 3,000, a mostly indoor middle-distance distance, which takes the place that usually it’s 5,000 meters. The most evident difference is in the 400 meters: outdoors each athlete stays in his own lane, indoors it happens instead that from the second lap we run together on the innermost lanes.
(PHOTO: JEAN-MARIE HERVIO / DPPI)
In Istanbul, the great favorite to win the two laps of the women’s 400 meters is the Dutch Femke Bol, who also runs the 400 hurdles outdoors. To understand how doing more laps and therefore more turns changes, the women’s record in the 400m outdoors, set in the 1980s, is 47 seconds and 6 tenths, while the indoor one – which Bol did in mid-February, in a period with many records indoors – is 49 seconds and 26 cents.
In indoor competitions, however, not only the length of the track changes. Other differences concern the number of lanes (which are narrower and are often 6 instead of 8) and some other technical features. As explains Mondo, an Italian company of sports surfaces and equipment, «on outdoor tracks the athletes run on a flat surface, while indoors, not only is the radius of the curve much smaller, but there is also a certain inclination». Furthermore, while «outdoor tracks generally have a single radius», indoor ones usually are multiraggio and with at least three different radii to «facilitate the transition between straight and curve and cornering».
Other particularities of indoor athletics are the competitions on multiple trials, which indoors have to do without some specialties and therefore become heptathlons for males and pentathlons for females (ie 7 and 5 specialties, instead of 10 and 7 as is the case all the time). ‘open).
Except for throwing and jumping, indoor athletics is short different: often shorter and necessarily less fast. She also lacks walking and athletics compared to her equivalent outdoor events. Waiting for the outdoor season, whose World Championships will be in Budapest in August, it is however an opportunity for the athletes to improve in a competitive (and not too cold) context and, for the spectators, to get to know some of the them, between slightly more unusual races and quite concentrated in space.
– Read also: When walking for sport