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The three finalists for the 2024 girls’s European Athlete of the 12 months trophy every received Olympic and European gold this summer season and supplied a few of the most iconic sporting moments of the yr.
The winners of the ladies’s and males’s European Athletes of the 12 months and the Rising Star awards will probably be introduced on the Golden Tracks award night time which will probably be held in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia on 26 October and streamed stay on the European Athletics YouTube channel.
From a long-list of 10 athletes, the three finalists had been determined primarily based on a four-part voting course of with a public vote, a Member Federation vote, a media vote and a European Athletics professional panel vote every accounting for one-quarter of the general vote.
In alphabetical order, the three girls’s European Athlete of the 12 months finalists for 2024 are:
Femke Bol (NED)
- European 400m hurdles and 4x400m champion
- Olympic blended 4x400m champion
- Olympic 4x400m silver and 400m hurdles bronze medallist
- World indoor 400m record-holder at 49.17
- World indoor 400m and 4x400m champion
- European 400m hurdles record-holder at 50.95
- Diamond League 400m hurdles champion
Femke Bol is in rivalry for her third successive girls’s European Athlete of the 12 months trophy after selecting up the crown in each 2022 and 2023. And the Dutch athlete delivered one other monumental season to place herself proper in rivalry to win an unprecedented hat-trick.
She produced an outstanding indoor season, profitable the 400m on the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow in a world document of 49.17, earlier than anchoring the Dutch to 4x400m gold. Heading outdoor, she received 400m hurdles gold and 4x400m gold on the Roma 2024 European Athletics Championships.
Ever the dedicated relay runner, she additionally raced the blended 4x400m and received bronze together with her Dutch teammates. Within the lead as much as the Olympics, she set a European document in La Chaux-de-Fonds with 50.95. Onwards to Paris and he or she received her first Olympic gold medal within the blended 4x400m, brilliantly snatching gold on the ultimate leg with a attribute burst, timed at 47.93 on the final leg.
She was disenchanted to solely come away with bronze within the 400m hurdles behind rival Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, however then added silver with the ladies’s 4x400m to finish the medal set.
Keely Hodgkinson (GBR)
- European 800m champion
- Olympic 800m champion
- World chief with 1:54.61
Since 2021, the British runner has come extremely near changing into the main girls’s 800m runner on the planet, profitable Olympic silver and twice world silver. However this yr was the yr by which she took the final step to the head.
Her first two lap race got here on the Diamond League in Eugene and a brilliantly executed victory in 1:55.78 set the tone for the summer season forward. Subsequent up got here Roma 2024 the place she ran a managed race to win her second ever European gold regardless of coming down with a head chilly.
En path to Paris, Hodgkinson clocked a world main 1:54.61 in entrance of her residence crowd on the Diamond League in London to maneuver to sixth on the world all-time 800m checklist earlier than underlining her place because the dominant 800m runner, operating to gold within the Stade de France in 1:56.72.
Yaroslava Mahuchikh (UKR)
- European excessive leap champion
- Olympic excessive leap champion
- World excessive leap record-holder with 2.10m
- Diamond League champion
Since profitable silver on the 2019 World Athletics Championships aged barely 18 with a 2.04m clearance, Yaroslava Mahuchikh has been marked as a generational expertise and 2024 was the yr when she etched her title into excessive leap historical past.
She was beneath par when ending second to Australian rival Nicola Olyslagers on the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow in March. However it proved to be not more than a blip in a powerful yr for the Ukrainian, profitable her second successive European Athletics Championship gold in Rome in June.
Then within the Diamond League in Paris in July, she broke the 37-year-old world document held by Stefka Kostadinova when she cleared 2.10m earlier than returning to Paris the next month to win Olympic gold and full the set of main excessive leap titles on the age of twenty-two.
The final ten girls’s European Athlete of the 12 months winners:
- 2023 – Femke Bol (NED)
- 2022 – Femke Bol (NED)
- 2021 – Sifan Hassan (NED)
- 2020 – not held
- 2019 – Mariya Lasitskene (RUS)
- 2018 – Dina Asher-Smith (GBR)
- 2017 – Katerina Stefanidi (GRE)
- 2016 – Ruth Beitia (ESP)
- 2015 – Dafne Schippers (NED)
- 2014 – Dafne Schippers (NED)
- 2013 – Zuzana Hejnová (CZE)
Chris Broadbent for European Athletics