Israeli athletes disappoint at Barcelona

A day of failures and missed expectations for Israeli competitors.

By ALLON SINAI
At the European Athletics Championships in Barcelona on Thursday, many of tthe Israeli athletes failed to exceed or even meet expectations.
 Yohai Halevi finished the triple-jump final in a respectable 11th place even though he failed to match his personal-best jump from the qualifiers.
His best attempt on Thursday was 16.43 meters, 33 centimeters short of his leap in Tuesday’s qualifying round, and more than a meter short of the gold-medal-winning jump, posted by Great Britain’s Phillips Idowu.
Meanwhile, Gezachw Yossef failed to qualify for the men’s 5,000m final, clocking a time of 13 minutes, 55.90 seconds to finish in 20th position in Thursday’s heat.
Earlier in the day, Brian Mondschein and Yevgeniy Olkhovskiy failed to add to Israel’s illustrious tradition in the pole vault competition at the Europeans.
Danny Krasnov was the first Israeli to reach the final at the championships, finishing seventh in 1994, before Alex Averbukh took local athletics to unprecedented heights by winning backto- back gold medals at the competition in 2002 and 2006.
There were, however, few expectations of Mondschein and Olkhovskiy and the two could only clear 5.30m on Thursday to finish in 23rd and 24th place, respectively, out of 29 competitors.
After his success in the 100m, where he reached the semifinals, there was disappointment for Dmitriy Glushchenko in the 200m on Thursday.
Glushchenko clocked a poor time of 21.09s, ending the event in 23rd position out of 31 sprinters.