Clean sweep and seven out of twelve for Italy in European marathon
Steven Downes in Budapest
BUDAPEST, August 22 - Seven medals out of 12 at the last four European Championships - that's the formidable record of Italy's men marathon runners after Stefano Baldini led an Italian cleansweep in this morning's race staged mainly along the banks of the Danube.On the coolest and wettest day of the championships thus far, a slow early pace - 1hr 06min 49sec for the leaders at 21km - was turned into a fierce, flurry of attack and counterattack in the latter stages.
Richard Nerurkar, of Britain, was the first to make a move, throwing in a 2:58 28th kilometre which reduced a leading group of more than a dozen down to five, includng the Briton, three Italians (Baldini, Danilo Goffi and Vicenzo Modica) and Alejandro Gomez of Spain. But when Baldini, the former IAAF half-marathon world champion, took up the challenge from Nerurkar with another kilometre in three minutes, the Briton - who won the IAAF World Cup Marathon in 1993 - was dropped.The race was then a contest between the Italians and Gomez and another Spaniard, Jose Rey, who fought his way back into the leading group. When Baldini and Goffi between them churned out two sub-five-minute miles between miles 23 and 24, the race was theirs.
Baldini, looking fresh at the finish, clocked 2hr 12min 01sec, finishing 10sec ahead of Goffi, with Modica third in 2:12:53. Spaniards filled the next three places, despite missing the Olympic champion, Martin Fiz, and IAAF world champion, Abel Anton. So it was little surprise that Italy won the European Cup four-to-score team event from Spain.
Luciano Gigliotti, Baldini's coach, said, "This is a dream result. The goal was to finish one-two-three, and we did just that." Italians have now won three of the last four European marathon golds, Gelindo Bordin winning in Stuttgart in 1986 and Split in 1990, with Fiz the only interruption in the Italian dominance of the event, having taken the title in 1994, a year before winning at the IAAF World Championships in Gothenburg. In this year's event, the whole of Italy was represented, with Goffi from Milan (North), Baldini from Emilia (Centre) and Modica from Sicily in the extreme South. The winner is the eighth child in a family of eleven and was born in the small town of Castelnuovo Sotto.
