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Hurdler Karsten Warholm: How fast can you be?
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Michael Steele / Getty Images
There is a huge problem with Karsten Warholm.
He doesn't make it easy to be suspicious.
The 25-year-old, who took the 400-meter hurdle run into a new dimension in Tokyo, speaks openly about the doping issue.
In an interview with the “Tagesanzeiger” he said the following sentence: “Anyone who knows the history of our sport cannot help but consider my performance to be very conspicuous.”
This can be interpreted as a forward defense, maybe this Norwegian, who lets one record after the other become history in his discipline, but is also actually clean. That one doubts when someone destroys one's old world record in a race by seven tenths of a second is probably normal after all that athletics has produced in the past decades.
45.94 seconds, the first time ever under 46 seconds, a stadium lap in which five runners had beaten their personal best in the end, these are just the numbers for now. Warholm has said time and again that the big races spur him on, but he couldn't prove it more emphatically than on that day in Tokyo. “The pressure is only pushing me to the limit that I've never reached,” he told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” two years ago. So the pressure must have been very great this time.
In fact, the sheer presence of his great challenger Rai Benjamin from the USA seemed to have propelled him forward.
You know that from Warholm, this running off as if the world were after him, "I run like a madman," he once said.
Like a madman and at the same time as concentrated as you can imagine.
Warholm didn't touch a single hurdle in the final in Tokyo, maintaining his pace as if he were clockwork and not a boy from the Norwegian fishing village of Ulsteinvik.
At the finish he roared out his ecstasy, which he had already done in 2017 with his first big triumph at the World Cup in London.
Back then, it took just an hour before they had already built enough memes on Twitter that compared Warholms outburst of temper with Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream".
Cooperation with coach is considered exemplary
Warholm may not yet come close to his compatriot Edvard Munch in terms of fame, but comparisons between the cheerful athlete and the painter, who was a master at capturing loneliness, despair and depression in pictures, are forbidden anyway.
While many athletes became gloomy during the pandemic, Warholm rebuilt Tower Bridge and the United Stadium Old Trafford with plastic bricks at home in lockdown and worked on his muscle strength.
When it got back on the track afterwards, Warholm was stronger than ever.
The collaboration with his father's coach Leif Olav Alnes is celebrated in Norway as a kind of role model for a perfect coach-athlete relationship, the athletic training of the Norwegian is considered comprehensive.
Warholm also competed in the decathlon and scored more than 7600 points, in the long jump his best mark is 7.66 meters, of course he also holds the national record of 400 meters flat.
But how credible, how serious is it all at the end of the day, when you run through such times that have been considered impossible to this day?
How fast can you be?
It's also a bit of a curse that Warholm is so towering.
The news agencies said after the run that the race "awakened memories of Usain Bolt's miracles," and you can probably put it that way.
World record lasted four weeks
He himself says that his coaches have always told him "that the perfect run is possible". But to put the perfect run on the track in the Olympic final is a very special gift. That doesn't make the skeptics less skeptical. This race in Tokyo makes him feel like "that I had Christmas Eve as a six-year-old." When people naively believed in the Christ Child.
Warholm has continuously improved his records since 2016, that speaks for him, that speaks for his extraordinary talent. Kevin Young's world record over the 400 meter hurdles, also set at the Olympic Games, lasted 29 years, then came Warholm. His best performance has now lasted four weeks, then he surpassed himself. He must "now set new goals," said Warholm after his triumphant run. Where will this end?