Adrianna Sułek (pronounced ; born 3 April 1999) is a Polish athlete competing in the combined events. She won the silver medal in the pentathlon at the 2022 World Indoor Championships. Sułek placed fourth in the heptathlon at the 2022 World Championships, and took silvers at the 2022 European Championships and 2023 European Indoor Championships.

She was the heptathlon 2018 World Under-20 Championships bronze medallist, and 2021 European U23 champion. Sułek is the Polish record holder for both the heptathlon and pentathlon. She won seven individual national titles.

Early life and background
Adrianna Sułek was brought up by her mother, a Polish philologist, in Ostromecko near Bydgoszcz. She started out playing volleyball and competed in 2014 as a middle attacker at Pałac Bydgoszcz club. After she had been given an ultimatum to play as a libero because of her height, she switched to track and field, competing for Zawisza Bydgoszcz and coached by Wiesław Czapiewski who died in 2019.

Sułek graduated from XI Sports High School in Bydgoszcz and, as of 2022, was a student of Journalism and Social Communication at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

Career

2016–2022
Sułek made her international debut in 2016, finishing 14th in the heptathlon at the European Under-18 Championships held in Tbilisi, Georgia.

After her bronze in the event at the 2018 World Under-20 Championships and European U23 gold in 2021, she had a breakthrough 2022 season. At the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade in March, the 22-year-old won the silver medal in the pentathlon, breaking Urszula Włodarczyk's 24-year-old Polish national record by 43 points with her score of 4851 points. In July, she placed fourth in the heptathlon at the World Championships held in Eugene, Oregon, totalling 6672 points and beating Małgorzata Nowak's Polish record dating back to 1985 by 56 pts. She wrapped up her long season the following month by taking silver at the Munich European Championships, where she lost injured (biceps femoris problems) only to two-time Olympic champion Nafissatou Thiam. Sułek set in this competition personal bests in three disciplines. She achieved altogether four heptathlons over 6400 points that year to secure her first overall World Combined Events Tour victory, becoming only the second Polish athlete after Włodarczyk in 1998 to do so.

2023–present
In March 2023, Sułek broke for the first time the pentathlon 5000-point barrier to set her second Polish record that year in the event. She established personal bests in four events and scored 5014 pts at the European Indoor Championships held in Istanbul, Turkey, beating the world record set in 2012 in the same Ataköy Arena by Ukraine's Nataliya Dobrynska (5013 pts). Finishing first the 800 m run, the final of the five events in pentathlon, Sułek held the new world record for about six seconds only and had to settle for silver, however, as Thiam set even better mark of 5055 pts.

Achievements

International competitions

Personal bests

Circuit wins and titles, National titles
 World Athletics Combined Events Tour Overall winner: 2022
 2022: Wiesław Czapiewski Memorial
 Polish Athletics Championships
 Heptathlon: 2019, 2021, 2022
 4 × 100 m relay: 2019
 Polish Indoor Athletics Championships
 Pentathlon: 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023

References

External links

 

1999 births
Living people
Polish heptathletes
Athletes (track and field) at the 2020 Summer Olympics
Olympic athletes for Poland
World Athletics Indoor Championships medalists
21st-century Polish women
21st-century Polish people
21st-century Polish sportswomen
European Athletics Championships medalists
Athletes from Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship