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After yesterday’s intense day of walking, which will forever remain in our memories, we want to share with our readers “the other side of the coin.”
This article (which we translated from the original Italian) is by Claudio Licciardello, an Italian track and field coach and former sprinter. Licciardello specialized in the 400 meters, a discipline in which he boasts the third-best Italian performance of all time. His track and field record includes two medals at the 2009 European Indoor Championships in Turin: gold in the 4×400-meter relay and silver in the 400-meter sprint.
Since 2015, he has been a professional coach for the Fiamme Gialle Athletics Group, specializing in speed and the training of national and international sprinters. He has coached Olympic and Italian athletes, contributing to the technical development of some of Italy’s top talents.
In September 2025, he flew to the United Arab Emirates and signed a contract as head sprint coach for the Abu Dhabi Athletics Club.
Does the European Championship Walk still make sense ?
Of course it does! You only need to see Massimo’s aura, a champion of everything, Sofia’s happiness, Alexandrina’s eyes, bright with tears of joy, Francesco’s satisfaction, and Andrea’s hunger, to understand it.
And in Birmingham, the European Championships, the walk presents itself at the most important event of the year, the one around which an entire season is built. Months of work to arrive at a morning, a jersey, a path, a possibility. For some, it confirms a career, for others, perhaps the only chance to compete for a continental medal. And that’s precisely why certain images leave a feeling that’s hard to shake.
We start very early. On a day that, at least in terms of temperature, didn’t seem to require such an extreme choice. But this is perhaps the easiest aspect to understand: a European Championship is organized months in advance, there are road closures, security, television, volunteers, traffic, needs that can’t be changed that very morning by looking at the thermometer.
But then we arrive at the route.
A circuit of about a kilometer, designed with climbs and descents, uneven asphalt, stretches of cobblestones, tight curves, and lanes broken up by barriers separating the two directions of travel. A short, repeated loop that becomes the container for everything. And within that container, the walking events come together: marathon and half-marathon, men’s and women’s. Not one at a time, but in the same space, at the same time, in the same collective breath. Nearly a hundred athletes move as a single, broken flow, forced to share every meter, every curve, every narrowing.
The result is an image that has something unreal about it. Entire groups that should be competing in their own race find themselves chasing a gap, searching for a corridor that isn’t there. It’s not a tactical choice, it’s not a phase of study, it’s not the management of a pace: it’s the physics of space imposing its law. Ahead, there’s no road, there’s density.
And then the race changes.
No longer a progression, but a forced coexistence. No longer a duel, but a line that opens and closes. Athletes competing for a medal are forced, for long stretches, to stay in a traffic jam that isn’t part of the sport but of the city.
The view, at times, is alienating. It doesn’t seem like an international competition, but a continuous flow that tries not to stop, as if the road had suddenly become too small for everything it must contain. And in the midst of that flow, every overtaking becomes a hypothesis, every acceleration a gamble, every meter gained an act of patience even more than of strength.
And yet, within that traffic jam, the race continues to exist. Even when it seems almost impossible to recognize it.
Then comes one of those scenes that alone would be enough to tell the story of the day. Antonella Palmisano steps on the base of a barrier and risks falling. María Pérez, one of her main opponents, supports her and points her down another line, almost as if to say: come this way, it’s safer.
It’s just a few seconds, but it contains everything. Two champions who should be thinking about pace, technique, and a medal, and who for a moment must instead simply worry about not crashing into a barrier on the course. And there’s even something beautiful, amidst this absurdity: the opponent extends a hand, protects her rival for a moment, and then goes back to fighting her.
Meanwhile, the judges are looking for the right place to do their job. And it’s not easy! Race walking relies on a technical gesture that must be observed, evaluated, and judged. But dozens of athletes, different groups, different distances, overlaps, and queues are constantly passing in front of you. Where do you stand? Who can you really see? How do you judge a support when before your eyes there’s a continuous line of bodies that fills the entire road?
And then there are the television crews, completing an almost surreal picture: balanced on unicycles, cameras in hand, intent on slaloming between curves, barriers, groups, and judges. More than crews, they look like circus tightrope walkers.
And here the irony ends.
Because inside that road there are years of life. There are winter mornings, kilometers walked alone, days when your legs don’t turn and you go out anyway. There are coaches who measure times, supports, volumes, who build a season around a date circled on the calendar. There are athletes who have given up a lot to get to Birmingham, knowing that, when the time comes, they would only have one chance.
This is what’s jarring: the magnitude of what they’re doing and the narrowness of the space they’ve been given.
And it’s not just Birmingham. For years, walking seems to live in a constantly rewritten identity. The 50km, then the 35km. The 20km. The 10km. Today the marathon and the half marathon. Distances change, formulas change, regulations change. Every choice certainly has its reasons, but on paper, changing a number is enough; in an athlete’s life, no.
A boy can grow up dreaming of becoming the best fifty-kilometer walker in Europe and discover, a few seasons later, that that race no longer exists. The rules change. Athletes and coaches must revisit their dreams.
And yet race walking continues to produce champions, stories, suffering, tactics, and incredibly challenging athletic feats. In the final kilometers, you see them progressively lose everything superfluous: the drawn face, the breath, the fear of giving up, the diminishing clarity, that kind of desperate pact every athlete makes with themselves when their body begins to say enough and their mind keeps asking for another hundred meters, another curve, another opponent.
And just as Birmingham delivers these images, those who organized these European Championships are already looking further ahead and presenting London as a candidate to host the 2029 World Championships. It’s legitimate, of course. London knows athletics; it has a history and a stadium that need no introduction. But a candidacy isn’t just a dossier, a facility, or a city to put on the cover. It’s also an idea of how one wants to treat the sport.
And it’s hard, then, not to think back to Rome 2024.
Much was said about Rome. The empty spaces in the Stadio Olimpico were highlighted, a venue with around eighty thousand seats, where twenty-five or thirty thousand spectators a day, despite being a considerable crowd, inevitably ended up seeming small.
In Birmingham, the Alexander Stadium seats just under thirty thousand. Yet the empty spaces are visible here too, day after day. But here, the empty spaces aren’t just numbers: they are spaces that breathe, interruptions in the noise, absences that widen between one match and the next, as if the stadium were listening to itself.
The comparison with Rome, however, concerns something else above all.
Rome might have had empty stands, but it never gave the impression that there were disciplines to show off and disciplines to perform. I don’t recall an athletics event divided between that worthy of the stadium lights and that staged almost secretly, all together to get the job done, on a kilometer of road where a hundred athletes must compete even for space to pass.
And perhaps this is the most important lesson.
A great championship isn’t great only when it fills a stadium. It’s great when it manages to give equal dignity to those who run a hundred meters and those who walk forty kilometers; to those who experience ten seconds of explosion and those who spend hours negotiating with fatigue. Because for the athlete, the gesture changes, the distance changes, the time changes. What they sacrificed to be there doesn’t change.
The race for the next great championship has already begun. London is looking to 2029, and it would be desirable if, along a less complicated route than the one designed for the Birmingham walk, we also learned to observe the spaces we are leaving empty around the athletes.
Because perhaps the most difficult void to fill isn’t the one in the stands.
It’s what remains when an entire sport begins to no longer recognize itself in the way we have decided to tell it.
Claudio Licciardello
Cover Photo: Andrew Boyers/REUTERS