Two years after winning individual silver, Great Britain’s Jacob Adkin celebrated a comfortable victory in wet and misty conditions in the uphill race on the first day of the European Athletics Off-Road Running Championships in Ljubljana-Kamnik on Friday (5).
When the elite men took off at the starting point in Stahovica for the uphill 8.9km, the weather was still fairly good: cool temperatures that are perfect for high-performance running and no rain. But with every step up the course to Velika Planina, it got worse and worse.
That would not bother Adkin too much though. He took the lead early in the race and after the halfway point of the 8.9km with a lactic-inducing total ascent of 1280 metres, he had already established a lead of about 1:30.
Adkin kept pushing up through wind and rain and eventually crossed the line in 49:21, finishing more than two minutes ahead of Sweden's Petter Engdahl (51:28) with Italy's Andrea Elia completing the podium in third (51:40). “It was tough and I didn’t know what to expect. But my legs were surprisingly good,” said the newly crowned champion.
"I felt good, so I took the chance," he said about his strategy of taking the lead early in the race. "When you feel good on the day you say: let’s try. So I kept pushing and did not turn around to see where the others were. The hardest thing was that it was cloudy and you could not see far ahead."
Engdahl won the race for silver to win Sweden’s first medal of the championships with a happy but exhausted Elia taking the bronze having also finished third on the exact same course in last year’s WMRA World Cup race.
Thanks to a very solid performance of their three best runners, Switzerland took the gold medal in the team competition. Dominik Rolli, Jonathan Schmid and Jonas Soldini finished fifth, sixth and tenth place.
Quentin Meylau just missed out on an individual medal in fourth but he led France to the team silver medal just ahead of Italy.
The mountain running programme concludes on Sunday with the men's and women's uphill and downhill race which is due to feature some of the protagonists in today's uphill-only races.