But on Sep. 13, 1970 in Paris both of them failed to get on the podium of the first edition of the European Junior Athletics Championship which was won by the East German (DDR) Lutz Lipowski (43.35 on 10.000m track walk).

Tenaciously with a painstaking work, Sandro Damilano, retraced for Marcia dal Mondo readers the whole story of these European Junior (now U20) Championships, of which today we are on the eve of the twenty-fifth edition.

After that first year we like to remember the first time of other historical names of race walk

Duisburg 1973: Hartwig Gauder (DDR) and Bo Gustafsson (SWE)

Athens 1975: Roland Wieser (DDR) and Maurizio Damilano (ITA)

Donetsk 1977: Ronald Weigel (DDR)

Bydgoszcz 1979: Jozef Pribilinec (TCH)

Utrecht 1981: Ralf Kowalski (DDR), Aleksandr Potashov (URSS) and Viktor Mostovik (URSS)

Cottbus 1985: Mikhail Shchennikov (URSS), Daniel Plaza (ESP) and Giovanni de Benedictis (ITA)

Birmingham 1987: Valentin Massana (ESP) and Robert Korzeniowski (POL)

Tessaloniki 1991: Ilya Markov (URSS) and Michele Didoni (ITA)

San Sebastian 1993: Aigars Fadejevs (LAT)

Nyiregyhaza 1995: Andreas Erm (GER), Francisco Fernandez (ESP), Ivano Brugnetti (ITA), Ivan Trotskiy (BLR), Sergio Vieria (POR) and Joao Viera (POR)

Ljubljana 1997: Juan Manuel Molina (ESP), Grzegorz Sudol (POL), and Robert Heffernan (IRL)

Riga 1999: Erik Tysse (NOR)

Grosseto 2001: Matej Toth (SVK)

Kaunas 2005: Rubino Giorgio (ITA), Miguel Angel Lopez (ESP) and Ruslan Dmytrenko (UKR)

Hengelo 2007: Matteo Giupponi (ITA), Christopher Linke (GER) and Kevin Campion (FRA)

The history of recent years has not yet been fully written for juniors athletes in senior categories.

We hope our readers go over this history with us.

It is very interesting to see how they were the first experiences of sixteen Olympic medals.

In some day will be published the full story of women.

Pages of the  history of European Juniores (U20) Championships: click here