None of the Poles had reached for the Speedway Euro Championship medal until 2016. They performed steadily, had some big sparks, however it was not enough to end in the TOP 3. This impasse was broken by Krzysztof Kasprzak.
In the previous editions of European Championship, Poland was represented by the most-titled riders. However, neither Tomasz Gollob nor Piotr Protasiewicz or Janusz Kołodziej, or younger riders: Przemysław Pawlicki and Maciej Janowski - for various reasons, were not able to reach for the medal.
Kasprzak advanced to SEC with one, big aim - winning the European Champion title. His adventure with SEC started a bit earlier, though, in 2013, when he got the win in Gorican, while racing with a wild card.
This time, he started with 2nd place in German Güstrow. In four frst starts, Kasprzak had 11 points and was leading the stake. However, in his last start, he made a tackle on Emil Sayfutdinov and got excluded from heat's repeat. Nevertheless, Pole got through to the big final directly. As we all know well, this heat was unable to take, so KK ended this rivalry at the 2nd place.
In Daugavpils it was much worse. Interwining good performances with some really bad ones, caused that Polish rider was clearly unsatisfied with his racing. Starts were really good, however he was losing position on the distance. Therefore, it was not a surprise, that after this meeting, Polish rider started to analyse meticulously the overall classification.
In Togliatti, history repeated itself. Kasprzak started with 4th position and an exclusion. He was sitting in the pits clearly glum, however in his three last heats, son of a great former rider - Zenon, was truly on fire. Once again, after last heat, KK was annoyed and came back to analysing his position in the overall classification, counting how many points he would have needed to get back to the top.
In Rybnik, he put his thoughts into action. In first three series, Kasprzak was unbeatable and in one moment, he was actually at the top of the overall SEC classification. There, he had to accept superiority of Nicki Pedersen and Vaclav Milik. That led to a draw and Pole and Czech were about to race once again, in the additional heat. Kasprzak was slightly slower under the tape and at the end of the day, it was him reaching for the bronze medal of Speedway Euro Championship 2016 - first one for the white and reds since taking this series by One Sport company.
