When he gets on the track, he wants to finish first. Says Joshua Abuaku. This Wednesday, the 27-year-old hurdler has the biggest race of his career ahead of him – and there’s no question of winning. At the World Championships in Budapest, he will compete in the finals at the highlight of the evening (9:50 p.m. on ZDF), with opponents such as the Jamaican champion Roshawn Clarke, who holds the U20 world record (47.34 seconds), the Olympic and World Championships runner-up Rai Benjamin from the United States and his compatriot Trevor Bassitt, who ran together in the world championship relay from Eugene, the world champion Alison dos Santos from Brazil and the Norwegian Karsten Warholm, who set the world record at 45.94 seconds in his Olympic victory in Tokyo 2021 pressed.
Over the distance of 41 years, Abuaku will also compete with the great hurdler Harald Schmid. His German record of 47.48 seconds, when Schmid won one of his three European championship titles in Athens in 1982, and achieved again at the World Championships in Rome in 1987, where Schmid came third, still seems too far away for the young man. After all, he has never run under 48 seconds. But why shouldn’t he try it?
