Gina Lückenkemper was 15 when she competed in her first international title fight, the U-20 World Cup in Barcelona, ten years ago now. Three years later, she was already at the adult World Cup in Beijing, as well as at the 2017 and 2019 World Cups, the 2016 and 2021 Summer Games. You quickly forget how full her letterhead is when you consider that Lückenkemper will be 26 in November gets old.
But in athletics, even ten years of professional experience are by no means enough to experience all the quirks of this sport, and on Sunday, on the third day of competition at the World Championships in Eugene, the time had come again: Lückenkemper and her fellow athletes climbed three times in the semi-finals 100 yards into the block before her run was released.
Back in the days of the old false start rule, that wouldn’t have generated much news value, but now any premature dashing away in the individual leads to disqualification. Lückenkemper’s competitor Tynia Gaither from the Bahamas was correspondingly upset when she was informed that she had been disqualified because of her hasty start.
First Gaither protested, then the audience. It was still screaming and whistling when the athletes were already sitting in the starting block for the second attempt. You can understand the furor of the athlete and supporters, said Lückenkemper later, “but I just found it unsportsmanlike that the audience made their displeasure so loud again when we were already sent to the block”.
Would she have made it to the final without theater? Hard to say. 10.95 seconds would have been enough, equivalent to Lückenkemper’s best time, not an impossibility after she had last offered 10.99 seconds in Berlin. It ended up being 11.08 seconds, “not what I had planned here,” she said. In the end, despite the bitter taste, she decided “to be satisfied all in all” with the semifinals and 13th place overall.
Others might have quarreled with having narrowly missed the World Cup final again. But if you understood Lückenkemper correctly, she was also satisfied because being close to the world’s best also meant that she was basically on the right track. It wasn’t long ago that she had to hear that her move to US trainer Lance Brauman’s camp in Florida had done little, that she didn’t show enough in competitions, despite various minor injuries. Lückenkemper knew, of course, that athletics is a waiting game, like gardening, it often takes months for the seeds of training to sprout.
Tenth place for pole vaulter Jacqueline Otchere is the best German result so far
Ronald Stein, the national coach, said a little more than a month ago that he would be satisfied with 11.15, a maximum of 11.05 seconds this summer – the 25-year-old had only had half a year of full training again. Lückenkemper now said that her upswing had hardly surprised her, that had been shown in training months ago. Either way: “I can already be very satisfied with this season,” she said, “because I’ve never run so consistently so fast in my entire career.” She said: 11.21, 11.04, 10.99, now 11.08, and the EM in Munich is still waiting.
Not that she will run out of work, until then and in general: Her start was also the slowest in the field in Eugene, and the 200 meters, which is also good training for the many rounds in major championships, she has not had in competition for five years tried out. It will also be sporty for the European Championships, in Eugene four Europeans were faster, above all the British Dina Asher-Smith in 10.83, British record. “There’s a new attack in Munich,” said Lückenkemper. First of all, the focus is on the sprint relay in Eugene anyway. Then she heard benevolently that Alexandra Burghardt was slowly regaining momentum after worrying about injury, in 11.29 seconds in advance.
This did not apply to the majority of the German delegation at the end of the first World Cup weekend: The discus throwers said goodbye in the qualification, pole vaulter Jacqueline Otchere, who had moved up to the World Cup at short notice, did not make it after 4.50 meters in the qualification in the final hoped for 4.60. Tenth place with 4.45 meters was still respectable – and up to Sunday the best German result so far.
