The Dutch runner Femke Bol, 24 years oldthe reigning world champion in the 400m hurdles and the same title holder – indoors – in the 400m, has already made a glorious impression at the Paris Olympic Games. On 3 August, in the final of the 4 x 400 mixed, another of her specialities, she came back from fourth place in the last leg and won the gold medal for her team. With an apparently calm style, Bol does not seem to go fast on the track. However, the way she accelerates about 200 metres from the finish line is already one of the most anticipated moments of the events she competes in.
The 400m hurdles semi-final is scheduled for Tuesday at 8:07 p.m. Bol will have a special opponent in her discipline: the 24-year-old American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the current Olympic champion. When Bol won at the World Championships in Budapest in 2023, her rival was not taking part in the race. They are the two fastest women in history in this event, and both are expected to reach the final next Thursday.
The 1.84m Dutch athlete started cross-country running as a primary school girl. Her breakaway on 3 August at the Stade de France did not surprise her childhood best friend Fleur Praas. As children, they ran for fun and won a few medals. At one such competition, Femke, who was 14, overtook her for good. “From then on I only saw her back,” Praas recalled.When I was growing up I could be a bit clumsy in my movements. and I have practiced coordination a lot,” explained the athlete. Hence the nickname “Bambi”, the deer in the Walt Disney film, which was a roe deer in the original novel by Austrian Felix Salten.
At the age of 15, Bol already won her first official national title in the 400 metres and in the junior B category. From then on, she started to win national and then European awards. She won a bronze medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were held in 2021 due to the coronavirus. She won three gold medals at the European Athletics Championships in 2022. And last year she broke the world record for the 400 metres indoors. As a result, she was named Athlete of the Year at both national and European levels. At that moment, Usain Bolt, the legendary Jamaican sprinter, congratulated her: “I know how hard you have worked to get here,” he told her, in a video call. He then jokingly asked Bol to “leave the gold medal for Jamaica next time.”
In athletics, there are two races that take your breath away: the lightning-fast 100-meter dash that Usain Bolt dominated for years, and those where the winner comes from behind and outpaces his competitors to cross the finish line first. In Paris, in the final of the mixed 4 x 400m, Femke Bol received the baton from her male compatriot, Isaya Klein Ikkink, and came in fourth place. It was the last leg and she was a long way behind the first-placed American, Kaylyn Brown. The die seemed cast, but the Dutchwoman began to accelerate and overtook the third runner and then the second. Thirty meters from the finish line, with the stadium roaring and the international sports commentators already hoarse, the athlete overtook the American and set the time at 3:07.43. It was a European record and three hundredths of a second above the world record, which had been broken by the United States in the qualifying rounds of the same event.
The joyous leaps of the Netherlands team, and the consoling hugs of their incredulous American rivals reflected the intensity of the unexpected moment. For Bol, who took out “all my anger when I compete and I let it go when I cross the finish line,” as she explained later, it also meant healing the wound of the mixed relay at the Budapest World Championships. In 2023, she tripped 10 meters from the finish line when she was in first place and was about to break the world record.
Born in the city of Amersfoort in the central Netherlands, her parents often accompany her to competitions. So does her older brother, Jeroen, 26, who teaches at a primary school. When she started to excel, Femke Bol moved to a Dutch residence for top athletes. “I no longer think it’s the end of the world if I train badly,” she told the sports magazine in 2022. Helden (Heroes). Despite her current successes, she does not forget that at the beginning she was not the club’s talent, “so it is fantastic that an ordinary girl [como yo]which was not always the best, I reached the top,” he says in the same interview.
Her partner is the Belgian pole vaulter Ben Broeders, 29, “who understands what sport and its schedules entail.” On the other hand, she knows that high-level athletics has a limit. That is why she studies Communication at Wageningen University, a center that allows her to adapt her subjects to the rhythm of her training. “I want to find a new passion when all this is over and try to work, because there is life after,” she says. Helden“Attention: Femke Bol is starting to accelerate,” the commentators warn as the races she is taking part in approach the finish line.
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