No Barrier Too Much for High-Flying Harting

Published by European Athletics on August 7, 2014

The good news for Robert Harting is that an hour after the discus final starts at the European Athletics Championships in Zurich on Tuesday, the women will line up for the 100m hurdles.

If all goes to plan with Germany’s field-eventer supreme, there may just be a few barriers left out for him to launch his 6ft 7ins frame over should he retain his title.

Let us not forget the scenes when he took gold at the Olympic Games in London just a few weeks after that European Athletics Championship glory in Helsinki when he went soaring down the home straight, leaping the hurdles, with the national flag draped over his back.

And if Harting, 29, wins again, the lap of honour will be from only the second man in the history of the championships to retain the discus gold medal. The other to have achieved the feat was Italian Adolfo Consolini who won three times in a row - in Oslo in 1946, Brussels in 1950 and Berne in 1954.

At this moment in time, Harting sits second on the European Athletics rankings with 68.47m from Hengelo in June, with his great adversary, Poland’s Piotr Malachowski, leading the lists with 69.28m, and the competition could end up being a duel between the pair of them.

Malachowski, 31, was European champion in Barcelona in 2010 but since then Harting, who was second four years ago, has flexed those huge muscles and monopolised the event. He is now a three-times world champion to go alongside his Olympic and European crown, the latter won in the rain of Helsinki with 68.30m.