Luciano Sušanj

Luciano Sušanj (born November 10, 1948 in Rijeka , SFR Yugoslavia ) is a former Yugoslav athlete .

Sušanj, who is 1.85 m tall and weighed 75 kg when he competed, became the European 800-meter champion in 1974 . He reached his first international placement at the European Indoor Games in Belgrade in 1969 , with the Yugoslav four-by-two-round relay he was fourth. At the Balkan Games he won the 400-meter run in 1969 and 1971 . In 1973 he won the title at the European Indoor Championships in Rotterdam in 46.38 s.

Then he switched to the 800-meter route. From 1973 to 1976 he won the Balkan Championships four times in a row. He won the 1974 European Indoor Championships in Gothenburg in 1: 48.07 min. In the summer at the European Championships in Rome , he won his preliminary run, but was only second in the semifinals behind the 18-year-old British Steve Ovett . In the final, Sušanj broke away from the crowd of other runners around 220 meters from the finish and sprinted to the finish, in 1: 44.07 min he ran the European championship record and won with over one and a half seconds ahead of Ovett.

At the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal traveled Sušanj as one of the favorites to. In the final, however, he could not follow the world record speed of the Cuban Alberto Juantorena and finished sixth in 1: 45.75 minutes, one place behind Ovett.

2001 Sušanj was elected President of the Croatian Athletics Federation. With his winning time in 1974, he was still the Croatian national record holder on December 31, 2006.

literature

• Ekkehard zur Megede: The Modern Olympic Century 1896-1996 Track and Field Athletics . Berlin 1999, published by the German Society for Athletics Documentation eV

Web links

• Balkan Games