The 28th European Athletics Indoor Championships took place at the brand new Palacio de Deportes in Madrid on 4-6 March in front of sell out crowds and millions of TV viewers across Europe.
40,000 tickets were sold for the three days of competition with 9500 spectators watching the sessions on Saturday and Sunday evening, the most ever at an European Athletics Indoor Championships.
Over 500 members of the media from 33 countries covered the Championships for 25 television channels, 30 radio stations and 150 newspapers, magazines and web sites.
Host broadcaster TVE showed eight and a half hours of the event live in Spain. An average of 1.2 million people, an audience share of 9.7%, watched the coverage on Sunday evening, with over 7 million people tuning in at some point during the transmission.
Over one million Eurosport viewers across Europe enjoyed 14 hours of coverage over the three days.
In the UK, the BBC broadcast over five hours of live action with a peak of 2.1 million viewers and a peak audience share of 11%. The average audience across the BBC’s five hours of coverage was 1.5 million, 0.4 million more than during the last European Athletics Indoor Championships in Vienna in 2002.
In Sweden, whose athletes won three Gold medals, SVT showed seven and a half hours of action with a peak audience of 1.6 million, an audience share of 19%.
There were also records broken in the competition arena. Russian Yelena Isinbayeva set her fourth World record of the winter with a 4.90m clearance to win the women’s pole vault and there were five other championship records set over the three days of competition.
Olympic Champion Stefan Holm cleared 2.40m to take the high jump title, the highest jump indoors since 1994. Fellow Olympic Champion from Sweden Carolina Klüft was less than 50 points away from breaking the World record with her score of 4948 points to win pentathlon Gold. Russia took a double in the pole vault with Igor Pavlov’s 5.90m equalling the championship record set in 1994 and Ivan Heshko (Ukraine) erased the 25-year-old 1500m mark from the books with his 3:36.70 victory. Finally the Russian quartet took four seconds off the mark they had set in Vienna in 2002 with 3:28.00 to win Gold in the women’s 4x400m.
The next European Athletics Indoor Championships will take place at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham, UK, on 2-4 March 2007. 13 World records in athletics have been set at the National Indoor Arena since it opened in 1992 and it was the venue for the 2003 IAAF World Indoor Championships and hosts the prestigious Norwich Union Grand Prix in February each year.
Emily Lewis
Communication Manager
European Athletic Association
Avenue Louis-Ruchonnet 18
CH-1003 Lausanne
Tel: +41 21 313 4357
Mobile: +41 79 694 4829
Email: emily.lewis@european-athletics.org