Pavel Maslak on his way to winning the 400m at the IAAF World Indoor Tour Meeting in Dusseldorf (© Gladys Chai von der Laage)
World indoor champion Pavel Maslak will head the 400m field at the Indoor Meeting Karlsruhe on 2 February, the second stop on the six-meet IAAF World Indoor Tour.
The winner at this meeting in 2012, the 27-year-old Czech returns after piecing together one of the finest indoor track records of the past decade, having collected each major indoor title available to him in the subsequent six years: European indoor crowns in 2013, 2015 and 2017 and world indoor titles in 2014, 2016 and 2018.
Maslak will also be chasing two things: most immediately, the meeting record of 46.11 set by East German Thomas Schonlebe in 1990, and points towards a second World Indoor Tour title in the event which he first won in 2017.
Organisers have also announced a mini-invasion of Greek jumpers. Paraskevi Papachristou, the 2018 European champion who also jumped to world indoor bronze in 2016, will take on Germany's Kristin Gierisch, who jumped to silver ahead of the Greek at the 2016 World Indoor Championships and won the continental indoor title one year later. Neither have jumped yet this season.
Meanwhile, Miltiadis Tentoglou, last summer's European champion in the men's long jump, has been added to the field in his specialty where he'll face another 20-year-old, Cuba's Juan Miguel Echevarría, the world indoor champion, who has already been announced. Tentoglou opened his season on a solid note, winning the Mediterranean indoor title last weekend (19) with a 7.99m leap, an indoor career best.
The fourth season of the IAAF World Indoor Tour gets underway in Boston on Saturday 26 January.
Organisers for the IAAF
