After ten kilometers, at half-time, walker Christopher Linke got a little scared.
39 minutes had passed, they had completed ten kilometers in this 20-kilometer final at the World Championships in Budapest. Although, Linke didn’t know that exactly, because the kilometer displays on the route were missing. He asked a colleague if it really was halftime.
And because the kilometer readings on the heart rate monitors actually didn’t contradict, Linke made a decision that one would have expected more from a rookie than from a 34-year-old veteran. He kept up the pace so that later “he could have burst away,” Linke said later. In any case, he didn’t want to make the same mistake as a year ago at the World Championships in Eugene, when he dropped out over 20 kilometers to save energy for the 35 kilometers. Shortly afterwards he was corona positive.
In any case, neither Linke nor his form burst this time. He even reached the finish line in fifth place, after 1:18:12 hours, 30 seconds faster than the national record that he had shared with Andreas Erm until the very end. New World Champion Alvaro Martin (1:17:32) was not far away; Linke had only been better on the intercontinental stage in 2019, fourth in the World Cup over 20 kilometers. Even if the pain simmered in him that such a frantic time was not rewarded with a medal, the performance at least set a completely different tone compared to the mixed German World Cup a year ago. And Linke also went ahead fearlessly in Budapest, for example as a critic of his world association, who, in an effort to put his athletes in the best possible light, likes to bring about the opposite.
Two days earlier, Sebastian Coe, the 66-year-old lord and president of the world association, sat on a podium in Budapest’s congress center. He initially drew the reporters’ goodwill to his side, joking about the garish green tie of a questioner (“I’m going to be color blind”). Then, in a gentle voice, he talked about how he wanted to transform the sport, which he had just been confirmed at the helm for four more years, in a somewhat radical way.
Coe spoke of a multi-day meeting that should take place for the first time in 2026, a kind of mini World Cup for years in which there are no world championships or summer games. At the same time, the massive program for title fights must finally be streamlined. Ironically, Coe, who once made a career for the Conservatives in Great Britain, wants to shake up the deeply conservative athletics. Everything, he said after his re-election, is now up for debate.
In the association’s new plans, Linke sees “an experiment at the expense of the athletes”
The walkers who opened the World Championships on Saturday show what this can look like. The discipline has a rich tradition – with one exception, the 50 kilometers have always been part of the Olympic program since 1932 – but for a long time the sport was only a bringer in a few countries, especially in doping-contaminated Russian sport. At world championships, the long distance has now been reduced to 35 kilometers, at the Olympics next year a completely new competition is to take its place: a mixed relay, 42 kilometers long in total, borrowed from the marathon. One male and one female walker per nation share the work, first the man walks 10.5 kilometers, then the woman, then the same thing again. One wants to put “the ability of women and men in a discipline” in the shop window, said Ridgeon, the managing director of the world association, when he presented the new format last year. This is “dynamic and unpredictable”, so it’s a big win.
Linke is contesting his seventh world championships in Budapest, he has reliably stayed at the top over the years, like so many colleagues in German walking. He dresses his words in clear, sober sentences, as if he were explaining the income tax form, Appendix AV13, to the other person – but that doesn’t take away from his message. “I don’t think that an endurance friend thought about it,” he said in Budapest.
Linke recently tried it out on the track at the German championships, first the 5,000 meters, then the 10,000, with a break in between, roughly like the new season. “I’ve found that it’s almost impossible,” he said. It might work in the single-mixed relay in biathlon, but the stress is shorter there, hardly comparable to high-performance walking for 40 minutes twice: “It’s very intense for the body.” Instead of the unpredictability that the creators of the format hope for, he believes it is more of an impracticability – “at least if it is to have a high level”. And the fact that the format will only really be tested in practice for the first time at the Olympics, he recognizes as “an experiment at the expense of the athletes”.
It also hurts Linke because his sport is finally ready to move out of its niche, the world’s top players are as good and strong as rarely – the 20 kilometers on Saturday were not the worst example. Instead, the long-distance, which is (still) part of the World Cup program with 35 kilometers (and promises the next German record for the left on Thursday), will probably gradually disappear. Because with the games, the new, obviously conditionally mature relay formats are in demand. The 20 kilometers remain as a stage, and on Saturday Linke presented at least one impressive message for the battered German team: “Even if the preparation was not optimal with many failures, you should believe in yourself and fight,” said Linke: ” I hope that many will take this as an example.”
