10th June 2009 04:57
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| Spanish prodigy Javier Cienfuegos is set to have a first dash at continental glory during the European Athletics Junior Championships to be held in Novi Sad, Serbia, from July 23-26. |
The Championships will be staged for the first time in Serbia between July 23-26 and the 19-year-old from the rural town of Montijo, who is now a first year university student at the prestigious Complutense de Madrid, has already advertised that he could bring the event to a climax as the men's hammer final is being staged on the last of the four days.
Cienfuegos - whose family name translates literally and dramatically as '100 fires' - has been making a bonfire of the Spanish record books this summer, throwing the 6kg hammer, which will be used in the Championships, out to a massive 80.25m. He has also sent the senior 7.26kg implement to an equally impressive 74.77m.
News of his feats have doubtlessly travelled across the continent.
With the lighter hammer, he has moved up to sixth on the European all-time list and is nearly three metres ahead of Hungary's kos Hudi, his nearest rival on this year's rankings,
He has also set eight Spanish junior records this year with the heavier ball-and-chain - having started 2009 with a best of 69.25m - and has the best throw in the world by a teenager for nearly a decade. Not since Finland's Olli-Pekka Karjalainen threw the current World and European Junior record of 78.33m in 1999 has anybody thrown as far as Cienfuegos and only two other men, apart from Karjalainen, have thrown further than him in the last 20 years.
No Spanish man has ever won a European Athletics Junior Championships medal in the Hammer, let alone the gold, but if Cienfuegos does leave Novi Sad with the ultimate prize hanging around his neck then his his name will be added to a formidable list of champions that includes Yuriy Sedekh and Andrey Abduvaliyev, both from the former Soviet Union, and Poland's Szymon Zió…‚kowski.
All three men went on to triumph at both the Olympic Games and also IAAF World Championships after gaining their first major title at the European Athletics Junior Championships.
'I'm looking to make up in Novi Sad for a disappointing final at the World Juniors last year when things didn't go the way I would have liked in the final, I had two fouls and the other throw clipped the cage. I could only finish 12th and last there, but now I'm already looking beyond the European Juniors to the World Championships in Berlin,' said Cienfuegos.
Cienfuegos may not have got on the podium at last summer's IAAF World Junior Championships, which were held in Bydgoszcz, Poland, but a whole host of other European athletes did and many of them are still eligible to compete in Novi Sad.
Among those athletes who are expected to demonstrate that the future of European athletics is in good hands are the French sprinter Christophe Lemaître, who was the World Junior 200m champion in 2008. Likewise, German Shot Putter David Storl got a gold medal last year an