🇮🇹 Alessia Succo

Succo was born on 7 February 2009 in Turin and started training in athletics at six. She competes for Atletica Settimese, the club of Settimo Torinese on the city's northern edge. Her progression reads as a straight line drawn very fast: a 60 m hurdles personal best of 8.19 seconds on 25 January 2025, aged fifteen; a world under-18 best of 8.07 later that season at the Italian under-18 indoor championships in Ancona; and 8.05 on the same track a year later.

The 8.07 mark took three hundredths off a time that had stood for eight years to Cyréna Samba-Mayela of France — an athlete who went on to become a global-level senior hurdler. Records in age-group sprinting tend to be set by future professionals, which is what makes the identity of the person you displace informative.

Her outdoor season in 2025 was better still. At the European Youth Summer Olympic Festival in Skopje she won the 100 m hurdles in 13.04 seconds, an Italian under-18 record, and took a second gold in the Swedish relay, running the second leg for an Italian team that set a European age-group record.

Then came the result that tested her against older athletes. At the European Under-20 Championships in Tampere in August 2025 she was the youngest athlete in the 100 m hurdles final at sixteen — and finished third, in 13.32 into a 1.5 metres-per-second headwind. A junior beating athletes up to three years older, in a headwind, is a harder line on a résumé than a record set against her own age group.

On 31 May 2026 in Bressanone she equalled the European under-18 best for the 100 m hurdles with 12.86 seconds into a 0.5 metres-per-second tailwind, tying Laura Frlickova's 2024 mark.

Sprint hurdling is the event where junior records translate least reliably into senior careers, because the discipline rewards a physical maturity that arrives at different ages. The 60 metres indoors compresses the problem: eight steps to the first barrier, five hurdles, and roughly eight seconds in which a single mistimed lead leg ends the race. Age-group bests in the event are therefore watched closely as predictors, and treated cautiously as promises.

Italy has become an unlikely centre for the specialism. A decade of federation investment in indoor facilities and youth competition — the national under-18 championships in Ancona among them — has produced a pipeline of hurdlers who reach European finals as teenagers, competing on a boarded indoor track that flatters technique and punishes hesitation in equal measure.

One correction is worth carrying: the English Wikipedia infobox dates the 8.05 to 2025, while its own text and the European Athletics report both place it on 15 February 2026. The 2026 date is the correct one.