The Paris 2024 Olympic Games might have finished but there is still plenty to look forward to both on and off the track before the end of the year!
Here's what's coming up over the next four months.
Four more streamed Continental Tour coming up
The World Athletics Continental Tour has already resumed after the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with events taking place across the length and breadth of Europe until mid-September.
And four of the remaining World Athletics Continental Tour events will be streamed live through either the European Athletics website or YouTube channel: Boras (21 August), Fribourg (1 September), Copenhagen (3 September) and Milan (8 September).
Confirmed names for the inaugural Fribourg Track Lab meeting, a Silver level event, include Nadine Visser and Pia Skrzyszowska in the 100m hurdles and reigning European champions Timothe Mumenthaler and Angelica Moser in the 200m and pole vault respectively.
On the same day, reigning European and Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson will drop down in distance to contest the 400m at the famous ISTAF meeting in Berlin, a World Athletics Continental Tour Silver event.
Olympic and European champions in Diamond League action
A plethora of gold medallists from the Roma 2024 European Athletics Championships and Paris 2024 Olympic Games will be competing in the five remaining Diamond League events this summer.
The Lausanne Diamond League begins this evening with the street pole vault featuring Armand Duplantis who competes for the first time since defending his Olympic pole vault title with a world record clearance of 6.25m.
The main programme takes place at the Stade Olympique tomorrow evening with recently crowned Olympic champions Yaroslava Mahuchikh, Yemisi Ogunleye and Miltiadis Tentoglou among the star names in action along with Femke Bol in the 400m hurdles while Jakob Ingebrigtsen takes on recently crowned Olympic champion Cole Hocker in the 1500m
European U18 and U20 champions head to Lima
The World Athletics U20 Championships take place in Lima, Peru from 27-31 August and a large European contingent will still be in action next week, including 12 reigning European U20 champions and 16 individual winners from the recent European Athletics U18 Championships in Banska Bystrica.
Some of the notable names competing include reigning European U20 100/200m champion Marek Zakrzewski from Poland along with Ukraine’s Mykhaylo Brudin (discus), Germany’s Amadeus Graber (decathlon) and Cyprus’ Valentina Savva (hammer) who have also won back-to-back gold medals at the European Athletics U18 and U20 Championships.
One of the stars of the European Athletics U18 Championships was Czechia’s Michal Rada who shattered the European U18 best in the 400m hurdles with 49.42 over the 84.0cm barriers. But at 16, Rada has already broken the 50 second-barrier in the senior hurdles with 49.89 and will be seeking his second major medal of the year.
And expect to see many of the medallists in Lima at next year’s European Athletics U23 Championships and U20 Championships which will take place in Bergen and Tampere respectively.
Clash of the Clubs III coming up in Pombal
But before then, some of the medallists from Lima could round off their seasons by competing for their clubs at the DNA U20 match - the Clash of the Clubs III - which takes place in Pombal, Portugal on 21-22 September.
Twelve teams from across Europe will compete across four matches in 12 events for bragging rights in Pombal.
Who will be crowned European Athletes of the Year?
The women’s and men’s European Athletes of the Year and Rising Stars will be crowned at the Golden Tracks award ceremony which takes place in Skopje, North Macedonia on 26 October, following on from the European Athletics Convention which begins on 22 October.
At last year’s award ceremony in Vilnius in Lithuania, Femke Bol and Jakob Ingebrigtsen were named Athletes of the Year while Angelina Topic and Mattia Furlani were crowned Rising Stars, a precursor to their medal-winning performances in Roma 2024.
But who will follow in their footsteps this year? The long-lists for all four categories will be announced in mid-September with the fan vote one of the components in determining who will come away with some silverware from the North Macedonian capital.
There will be live streaming of the Golden Tracks award ceremony with more details to be confirmed in the coming weeks.
European Cross heads south to Antalya
The SPAR European Cross Country Championships rounds off another busy year of major events on 8 December.
This year marks the 30th edition of the annual championships which first took place in Alnwick, Great Britain in 1994 and was held in Laeken Park in Brussels last December.
Norway’s Karoline Bjerkeli Grøvdal ploughed through the thick mud to win her third successive senior women’s title last year while France’s Yann Schrub sprung a surprise in the men’s race, winning individual senior gold.
The most dominant winner of the day last year was Great Britain’s Megan Keith who looked more than at home on the mud and on the hills, winning the U23 race by a staggering 83 seconds which was the biggest winning margin in SPAR European Cross Country Championships history.
But conditions will be significantly different in Antalya in Türkiye this year with warm weather and firm underfoot conditions anticipated at the city’s Dokuma Park.