There were no surprises on the last day of the European Indoor Athletics Championships and Portugal concluded the competition with the three medals it had already won, thanks to the performance of the three most accredited athletes in the entourage. This Sunday, in the women’s long jump final, Evelise Veiga couldn’t escape last place.
Making her debut at the Europeans, the jumper who turned 27 last Friday, already in Istanbul, got a place in the final with 6.53m, a mark that approached her personal record (6.58m). This afternoon, not even that record would have allowed her to go beyond the eighth place, in a contest which she clearly arrived as a outsider.
Evelise Veiga started with a zero jump, which was followed by a very modest test (5.24m) before entering the six meter spectrum: 6.36m, 6.11m, 6.07m and 6.19m. Her best test was, even so, 21 centimeters from the penultimate classified and almost 70 from the winner, the British Jazmin Sawyers, who did a growing test and won the gold medal with the best world mark of the year (7.00 m ). The Italian Larissa Iapichino (6.97m) and the Serbian Ivana Vuleta (6.91m) completed the podium.
Earlier, another of the Portuguese in action on the last day of the Europeans failed to reach the final of the 60 meters hurdles, ending the competition in 13th place. The Sporting Barrier player ended the second series of the semi-finals in seventh place, in 7.81 seconds, a record that fell short of his personal record (7.67s) and the best mark of the year (7.73s).
“I felt good, I was confident and sure I was going to make it, but I hit a barrier and didn’t have time to recover. It was another semi-final and now it’s time to work because there is a long way to go”, he summarized, quoted by the Lusa agency. “I think that if I hadn’t hit the barrier I could have fought for the presence in the final, but I also have some inexperience on these stages”.
As happened in Valencia (1998) and Torun (2021), Portugal ends the indoor track Europeans with three medals — in Spain it won one title, in Poland three, in Istanbul it stayed for two. Even so, in specific terms (presences in finals also count for this purpose), this edition in Turkey turned out to be the best ever for the national delegation, which reached 41 points (two years ago there were 33).
“We had two fourth places. One [Tiago Pereira] was six centimeters and another [Jessica Inchude] to nine. We could be here talking about five medals or even more. I think it was a good result, among the great powers of Europe”, summarized the national technical director of the Portuguese Athletics Federation, José Santos.
Portugal finished in sixth place in the Istanbul 2023 medal, among the 47 countries present, just behind Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Italy and Belgium.