Monte-Carlo – With the completion of the recent Asian Championships in Guangdong, China, the last event of the 2009 IAAF Combined Events Challenge has been completed, and the overall winners are Trey Hardeeof the USA and Nataliya Dobrynska from Ukraine.

2009 represented the 12th successive year that this Challenge has been held, and, as well as the five individual permit meetings, this season the series included the World Championships in Berlin, and a number of other competitions including the Universiade, Asian Championships, European Cup meetings etc….

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The Challenge offers a total of US$202,000 in Prize Money paid by the IAAF which is distributed to both the top-8 men and women as follows: 1st $30,000, 2nd $20,000, 3rd $15,000, 4th $10,000, 5th $8000, 6th $7000, 7th $6000, 8th $5000.

Athletes had to complete three competitions from the list of 14 meetings this year to be eligible to contend for the overall price, and in 2009 twenty male athletes and twenty-two women made the grade. In total 335 athletes participated in one or more meetings.

Men - DECATHLON

The overall winner of the men’s challenge was the USA athlete Trey Hardee. The 2009 World champion in the Decathlon took the overall victory (25,567pts) via a second place in the Austrian city of Götzis (8516 points), the USA trials in Eugene (8261 points) and with a personal best performance at the World championships in Berlin (8790 points).

Hardee is the successor to last year’s winner Andrei Kravchenko and other illustrious names such as 4 times winner Roman Sebrle (CZE), Olympic 2000 champion, Erki Nool (EST)  - 2 times winner, former World record holder Tomas Dvorak – also 2 times winner, and Tom Pappas (USA) and Dmitriy Karpov (KAZ).

Second place in 2009 was taken by Cuba’s Yordanis Garcia, who was ninth  in Berlin. He is in the vanguard of a new, young generation of decathletes from his country who are likely to play an important role in this event in the coming years. His countrymen Leonel Suarez was the World championships silver medallist and had taken second position in the Challenge last year. Garcia is only 20-years-old and his comrade is 22-years-old. Garcia totalled his score of 25,231 points in Cuba (La Habana) and in Germany (Ratingen and Berlin).

Ukrainian athlete Oleksey Kasyanov, who won the Décastar meeting in Talence, secured third place in the overall standings ahead of World championships bronze medalist Aleksandr Pogorelov (RUS). He completed his third meeting in Talence, but his score was not enough to pass Kasyanov.