Hurdles or other obstacles are nothing that can stop Karsten Warholm in his forward drive. In the 400-meter hurdles at the Diamond League meeting in Stockholm, he once again outperformed the competition. With his long strides, the Olympic champion stormed towards an unchallenged victory on lane eight in 47.57 seconds.
However, almost all of his competitors on the inside lanes had one more hurdle to overcome than the series winner from Norway and could not finish the run regularly. Shortly before the finish, demonstrators had set up on lanes two to six and blocked the runners with posters.
The Estonian Rasmus Mägi and the Italian Alessandro Sibilio on lanes three and four were particularly affected – but they didn’t bother with the activists’ demands for long, they just ran through the posters. In view of their high speed on the home stretch, the three climate protesters fell over like skittles in a bowling alley.
The runners, who finished third and fourth in 49.04 and 49.11 seconds respectively, avoided a collision that could have been dangerous. Kyron McMaster (British Virgin Islands) finished second on lane seven largely unchallenged (48.94). “Today there was an eleventh hurdle,” said Frenchman Wilfried Happio, who finished fifth (49.67).
Although world record holder Warholm had a clear path, he was also “a bit irritated” before the finish line, as he said afterwards: “What the hell is going on there”, it shot through his head. He later expressed anger at the activists’ action. “What these people can afford is impossible,” Warholm commented in an interview with the Swiss television channel SRF. It’s always okay to state an opinion publicly, but it has to be done in a civilized manner. The demonstrators on the track would have prevented athletes from working who have been preparing for their race for months: “That’s bad style”.
Michael Reinsch, Munich Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 1 Michael Reinsch Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 5 Published/Updated:
The three activists were then taken away by security forces to boos from the crowd. The organizers of the meeting announced that they would file a complaint against them. The climate movement Återställ Våtmarker (“restore wetlands”) declared itself responsible for the action. “I’m doing this because we are at the beginning of a climate catastrophe,” said one activist involved in a video shared on Twitter.
Karsten Warholm, double world champion and double European champion, who has won all major races on his special course since 2017, had chosen lane eight in Stockholm in adverse conditions in order to be able to run in the shade of the grandstand as unmolested as possible by the wind. In addition, he cannot see what is happening on the other lanes and compete in his “own race”. “I’m running blind,” said the Norwegian about his tactics: “It’s my way of running.” On Sunday he undermined the protest of the demonstrators.
