Italy’s Cosimo Caliandro wins the 3000m in Birmingham (© Getty Images)
Italy took an overwhelming win in the international indoor match against Finland held in Ancona on Saturday 2 February. Italy played host to this match one year after the two countries was held a similar fixture in the Finnish city of Tampere.
Ancona featured the comeback of last year’s European Indoor 3000m champion Cosimo Caliandro who has been in Namibia training with a group of Italian distance runners led by Olympic marathon champion Stefano Baldini.
Caliandro won the 3000m in 7:52.11 beating young Italian Marco Salami who improved his PB dipping under the 8-minutes barrier with 7:59.99.
The best technical result came from the women’s 60m Hurdles where Micol Cattaneo ran the second fastest time in history in Italy with 8.05 secs. Only Carla Tuzzi has run faster than Cattaneo in the history of this discipline in Italy clocking a long-standing national record of 7.97 in 1994.
Italian sprinter Fabio Cerutti, a European Indoor Championship’s finalist last year, got off to a flying start equalling his PB with 6.62, the same time he clocked in Birmingham where he finished sixth.
Italian outdoor and indoor Triple Jump record holder Fabrizio Donato competed in the long jump winning the contest with a best jump to 7.95m on his third attempt, while high jumper Filippo Campioli cleared 2.25m on his second attempt missing three tries at 2.28m.
Livio Sciandra won a very tactical men’s 800 metres in 1:50.77, holding off young italian Markus Rifeser who improved his lifetime best to 1:48.21 in Vienna this week.
Italy won 15 out of 16 competitions taking the final victory with a score of 109 points to 59 with the only Finnish win taken by Suvi Sulvenius (formerly Myllymäki) in the women’s 800 metres in 2:05.23.
Diego Sampaolo for the IAAF
