Miltiadis Tentoglou retained his men’s long jump title at the European Athletics Championships in Rome with an extraordinary sequence of five big eight-meter jumps.
He set a championship record, new personal best and world lead of 8.65 meters with his two final efforts.
Tentoglou has now won three consecutive golds in the European championship.
In an electrifying competition, the 26-year-old Olympic and world champion laid down a huge first-round marker of 8.42 meters, and after a second-round foul, he then registered 8.49 meters and 8.45 meters before his concluding flourish, beating both times his previous personal best of 8.60 meters set in 2021.
Italy’s 19-year-old rising talent Mattia Furlani won the silver medal, and Switzerland’s Simon Ehammer won the bronze.
“I managed the PB – twice the same mark. I do not know, this is impossible,” said the Greek jumper.
“I wanted to do 1cm more to improve our national record but it just did not happen,” he said. “My coach told me after the first 8.65m that I should push myself even more because I could do it. I told him, that I did five jumps around 8.50 all of them and I felt tired.”
“I am dead, I gave my everything. And he said: ‘Come on, you can do it!’ And I did it – I tried but I was very tired,” he revealed.
How Tentoglou became a legend in world athletics
In March this year, Miltiadis Tentoglou retained his long jump crown on Saturday with 8.22 meters at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland.
Tentoglou won the gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the gold medal at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest.
In 2022, Tentoglou became the World Indoor champion, jumping the current Greek indoor record of 8.55 meters, which places him sixth on the respective world all-time list. He won a silver at the outdoor World Championships.
He is a six-time European champion, winning three consecutive outdoor titles in 2018, 2022, and 2024 and a record of three successive men’s indoor titles between 2019 and 2023.
Miltiadis Tentoglou was born in Thessaloniki on March 18, 1998. He grew up in the town of Grevena, where he spent his childhood and teenage years.
Until the age of 15, he had no experience in field and track whatsoever. However, in his teenage years, he was practiced parkour as a hobby.
He incidentally got involved with track and field at the age of 15 at the urging of the Greek track and field coach Vangelis Papanikos, who had observed him doing parkour in the stadium bleachers at the Grevena stadium. Papanikos was the first person to recognize Tentoglou’s exceptional natural talent and his great physical agility, and he actually was his first coach.
Then in 2017, Tentoglou teamed up with renowned Greek-Bulgarian coach, Georgi Pomashki, who is his current coach. Pomashki is the coach who led Tentoglou to the top.
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