14 sie From Polish University Championships to the Gold Medal at the Olympics

This year’s Olympics brought a lot of joy to many elite athletes – among them, not only student-athletes from University Sport Association of Poland (AZS), but also participants from this year’s Students Championships.  

Altogether, 72 out of 216 representatives from Poland in Tokio trains in University Sport Clubs in Poland – and some of them are still students taking part in the Polish University Championships. In the end, out of 14 medals for Poland at the Olympics, 9 of them were won by athletes from AZS clubs.  

Although AZS clubs in Poland associate not only current university students, many of them is combining sport career with education. Some of the greatest examples for that are Gold medalists from Tokio – Natalia Kaczmarek (AZS AWF Wroclaw), Kajetan Duszynski (AZS Lodz) and Dariusz Kowaluk (AZS AWF Warszawa), who competed in the Polish University Athletics Championships in 2021, just few months before their success at the Olympics. They all took part in Mixed 4×400 Relay.  

Polish University Athletics Championships are one of the biggest national championships for students-athletes. This year, over 1000 students took part in the event organized in Bielsko-Biala. Every year, except for students under 28 years old, an additional AZS Championships are organized for non-students but still members of University Sport Clubs. Last year’s Athletics Championships were attended by Paweł Fajdek – hammer thrower, 4-time World Champion as well as Gold Medalist from Summer Universiades in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. After winning the AZS Polish Championships in 2020, he went on to win bronze medal in Tokio.