The leading performances by Europe's leading athletes will be officially recognised in a new Gold Crown initiative at the Roma 2024 European Athletics Championships, which take place from 7-12 June.
For the first time ever at the continent's showpiece event, athletes will compete to deliver the best performances and be rewarded with a Gold Crown.
Ten Gold Crowns, each coming with a performance bonus of €50,000, will be awarded. The Gold Crowns will go to the top man and woman who come out on top in each of five groups of events at Roma 2024.
The groups of events are:
WOMEN
A) Sprints & Hurdles (100m, 200m, 400m, 100m hurdles, 400m hurdles)
B) Middle & Long Distance (800m, 1500m, 5000m, 10,000m, 3000m steeplechase)
C) Throws (Shot Put, Discus Throw, Hammer Throw, Javelin Throw)
D) Jumps (High Jump, Pole Vault, Long Jump, Triple Jump)
E) Road, Combined Events & Relays (Half Marathon, 20km Race Walk, Heptathlon, 4x100m, 4x400m)
MEN
F) Sprints & Hurdles (100m, 200m, 400m, 100m hurdles, 400m hurdles)
G) Middle & Long Distance (800m, 1500m, 5000m, 10,000m, 3000m steeplechase)
H) Throws (Shot Put, Discus Throw, Hammer Throw, Javelin Throw)
I) Jumps (High Jump, Pole Vault, Long Jump, Triple Jump)
J) Road, Combined Events & Relays (Half Marathon, 20km Race Walk, Decathlon, 4x100m, 4x400m)
The concept of performance bonuses for Roma 2024 were agreed by the European Athletics Council in October 2023 and the European Athletics Council confirmed the amount and how the bonuses will be distributed in January 2024.
The winners of each Gold Crown will be the athlete within each group of events that achieves the highest scoring performance in their final using World Athletics scoring tables.
World record breakers ready to perform in Roma
With four European athletes having broken world records since last September, and each one of the quartet committed to competing at Roma 2024, it adds an extra thrilling dimension to the competition in the Italian capital.
Already this summer, Armand Duplantis and Mykolas Alekna have set new men’s world records in the field events.
Sweden's serial record breaker Duplantis added a further one centimetre to his pole vault record in Xiamen, China on 20 April, clearing an astonishing 6.24m.
In contrast, the men’s discus record had stood at 74.08m by Germany's Jürgen Schult since 1986 but that became ancient history when Alekna, from Lithuania, launched the implement out to a monstrous 74.35m in Ramona, USA on 14 April.
Femke Bol was the outstanding female athlete of the past winter's indoor season, the Dutch runner setting a new 400m short track record of 49.17 on her way to winning gold at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow.
And last September, Norwegian middle-distance icon Jakob Ingebrigtsen set a new world record for the non-championship distance of 2000m, running 4:43:13 in Brussels.
Add the current men’s 400m hurdles record holder Karsten Warholm of Norway (45.94, Tokyo 2021) and you have a heady cocktail of brilliant Europeans who could potentially be in the mix for the performance bonus.
The best athletes
The landmark initiative will see athletes earn financial rewards for the first time ever at Europe’s premier athletics event, which has a 90-year history back to the inaugural championships that were held in Turin, Italy in 1934.
The Gold Crown initiative comes on the back of the publication of the new European Athletics Strategic Roadmap 2024-2027 in which competition and athletes are a priority and it includes an objective to “strengthen the European Championships, attracting the best athletes and creating the best possible event for fans, sponsors and broadcasters alike.”