The men’s decathlon was an extremely tight match between two very experienced athletes, Tomaš Dvorak of the Czech Republik and Attila Zsivoczky of Hungary.
Both scored 8105 points and both had same amount of event victories. It meant that the jury had to check, which had the highest single event score. It was Dvorak's 110m hurdles result 14.56, hich gave 903 points against the Hungarian’s 2.10m and 896 points in the high jump.
Dvorak's 69.11m in the javelin was one of the finest efforts of the second day. “My aim here was to break the A limit for the Helsinki World Championships and I did it,” Dvorak commented.
Dvorak's relief is easy to understand. He had scored only 7720 points this season before Jyväskylä. After that competition in Salo, Italy on 8 May he did not finish in Götzis and Stara Boleslav.
Jaakko Ojaniemi of Finland (5th in European Championships in 2002) took third place with 7977 points.
The winning team was Hungary (Zsivoczky, Zsolt Kürtösi and Attila Szabó) with 22879 points, but the home crowd had something to cheer for as Finland (Ojaniemi, Aki Heikkinen and Sami Itani) took second place with 22771 points and will join Hungary to the Super League next year.