Italian jumps prodigy Mattia Furlani made 2024 a breakout year and a lot is expected from the odds-defying 19-year-old this year.
Mattia Furlani made quite the leap in 2024 after a breakout season.
At the age of 19, the Italian jumps talent became an Olympic medallist, a world indoor medallist, a European medallist and a world U20 record-holder. This, he credits to the great memories of watching the Olympic Games in Tokyo and hopes to be part of another successful Italian team when global athletics action returns to Japan’s capital in 2025.
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The Italian who was then 16 reflected when asked about his memories of the Games saying: “For Italy, it was a special Olympic Games because we got five gold medals. The gold medal by Gianmarco Tamberi, in the high jump, because that was when I did high jump and I was not a long jumper. I saw with my eyes, the emotion. He is one of my biggest inspirations. And the gold medal in the 100m from Marcell (Jacobs). That was a big inspiration, too, because before the 100m, Marcell was a long jumper,” Furlani told World Athletics.
Considering his own progression, Furlani added: “Every year I beat my personal best and maybe in 2024 people expected more evolution from me. The aim is to try to evolve year after year.”
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2024 was a transition year for Furlani as he made the move from the U20 to senior ranks, leading to him being named Men’s Rising Star at the World Athletics Awards in Monaco.
At 19 years and 24 days in March 2024, Furlani became the youngest athlete in history to win a world indoor medal in the horizontal jumps. His first-round leap of 8.22m matched the mark achieved by multiple global gold medallist Miltiadis Tentoglou of Greece, with Tentoglou only beating his teenage rival on countback courtesy of a superior second-best jump.
His journey continued the following month, when he opened his outdoor season at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Suzhou before heading back home to compete in Savona in May. Leaping 8.36m, Furlani added one centimetre to the world U20 record of 8.35m that had been set by Russia’s Sergey Morgunov in 2012.
In the lead up to the World Indoor Championships, Furlani had jumped 8.34m at the Italian Championships, missing that record by a single centimetre. At the European Championships, competing in front of a home crowd once again, he improved the world U20 record to 8.38m to secure another silver medal behind Tentoglou.
Furlani became an Olympic medallist two months later, leaping 8.34m to bag bronze behind Tentoglou and Jamaica’s Wayne Pinnock in Paris.
