Overcome five more hurdles, storm onto the podium again. Afterwards, Cindy Roleder from Halle took off her racing shoes and symbolically placed them behind the finish line at the German Indoor Championships in Dortmund. The long and successful career of the 33-year-old athlete ended with a bronze medal in the 60-meter hurdles. There was a bit of melancholy on her last lap of honor, and she was greeted by a wave of acknowledgment from the audience for her achievements.
She was second at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, and a year later European Champion in Amsterdam. If you ask Rüdiger Harksen, who has been the national coach for the discipline for 37 years, he says: “Cindy Roleder has been the most successful German hurdle sprinter since reunification.” He lists the names that made the discipline a flagship of the German Athletics Association (DLV): Gabi Lippe-Roth, Kirsten Bolm, Carolin Nytra, Pamela Dutkiewicz and Roleder. Together they have won 19 international medals, Roleder alone six.
On the way to one of her greatest successes: Cindy Roleder in the semi-finals of the 2015 World Championships in Beijing – she surprisingly won the silver medal in the final.
(Photo: Christian Charisius/dpa)
“I’m at peace with myself,” summed up Roleder, mother of a two-year-old daughter, after her lap of honor, and she was glad that everything went the way it did. “It’s a shame that Cindy is stopping,” said colleague Monika Zapalska. The new champion from Wattenscheid, 28 years old, follows a great role model. The next generation of German hurdlers is still a long way from their predecessors. Zapalska won in Dortmund in 8.10 seconds – that puts you 27th in Europe. It is not the only discipline in which there is a lot of catching up to do in German athletics.
A “very ambitious, goal-oriented and consistent athlete”, that’s how Roleder’s longtime trainer Wolfgang Kühne from Halle described Roleder. She came to the Saale from Chemnitz in 2013. For a while she trained under Kühne, for many years heptathlon national trainer in the DLV, also as an all-rounder. The varied training drove her performance up by leaps and bounds.
Corona disease postponed the end of his career
In 2020, Roleder then took a baby break. It was no longer enough for the Olympic Games the following year, and she also had to postpone the planned withdrawal from the 2022 European Championships in Munich: Corona disease caused a deep cut, and Roleder ended the season with poor liver values. The farewell now followed with the bronze medal at the indoor championships.
When she left Dortmund, Roleder took the hall microphone and thanked her coach for his life’s work, which was very well received by the 4,000 spectators. Born a few weeks before the political change in 1989 in Karl Marx-Stadt, she too was a child of the former GDR in sport. “Athletics has been my life since I was eight years old,” she said. In the sports grammar schools in Chemnitz and Leipzig, she experienced her competitive sports training. Her breakthrough came in 2014 with bronze in the 100 meter hurdles at the European Championships in Zurich. Only one Olympic medal is missing from the balance sheet.
With her best time of 12.59 seconds, achieved in her silver run in Beijing 2015, she ranks tenth in the all-time German ranking; the top six come from the former GDR. Because Roleder was not seen as a specialist for the shorter indoor distance due to her rather weak start, she does not name Beijing or Amsterdam as the emotional peak of her career, but winning the 2017 European Indoor Championships in Belgrade.
“I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, but now I have to mentally say goodbye to what was important to me,” she said in Dortmund. Her preference for the “crime scene” is probably related to her professional situation. Cindy Roleder has made provisions for the time after competitive sports. She will take her place as a police officer in the Federal Police.