Athletics star Karsten Warholm secured gold in the 400m hurdles and broke Harald Schmid’s 40-year-old European Championship record.
The Norwegian successfully defended his Berlin 2018 title in 47.12 seconds in front of Frenchman Wilfried Happio (48.56) and Yasmani Copello (Turkey/48.78) in the Munich Olympic Stadium.
Joshua Abuaku missed a medal in fifth place by a hundredth, the man from Frankfurt ran a personal best of 48.79 seconds.
“My best performance at the high point of the season – that’s how it should be. But it was so close, the medal so close, I’m actually rather disappointed in the end,” said Abuaku on “ZDF”.
Schmid, five-time European champion, set the previous record in Athens in 1982 with a time of 47.78 seconds. With his gold medal in Stuttgart in 1986, the native of Hanau also provided the last German European Championship medal in this discipline.
After an injury break, Warholm was aiming for the third world title in a row at the World Championships in Eugene in July, but the exceptional athlete ran out of strength 100 m from the finish line. In the end, the disappointing seventh place was his. A month later, as a consolation, he won the European Championship again in a sovereign manner.
Constantin Preis (Sindelfingen/49.55) was eliminated in the semifinals despite a best performance of the season.