Adrianna Sułek-Schubert

Adrianna Sułek-Schubert 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 won the silver medal at the 2022 European Championships and 2023 European Indoor Championships. She is also a two-time Olympian and competed at the 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics.
Sułek was the heptathlon 2018 World Under-20 Championships bronze medallist and the 2021 European U23 champion. She is the Polish record holder for both the heptathlon and pentathlon, and has 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.

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 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.

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. 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.

She is married to a former Polish hurdler, Kacper Schubert. In February 2024 she gave birth to their first child.