athletics
Olympic champion Mihambo aims for World Cup hat-trick
Malaika Mihambo starts the new season. photo
© Sven Hoppe/dpa
World Champion 2019, World Champion 2022 – and this time? Malaika Mihambo starts the pre-Olympic season with a “lust for more”. An unfamiliar experience drives.
The unusual experience at the European Championships should give long jump Olympic champion Malaika Mihambo a boost on her way to a feat at the World Championships.
After Germany’s athletics star was unusually not on the podium in fourth place at the European Indoor Championships, that should change again at the season’s highlight in summer. “I want to get started after the indoor season left me wanting more,” said Mihambo ahead of her long jump season start on Friday at the Diamond League meeting in Florence.
However, the way to the international competition in Tuscany did not go according to plan for the 29-year-old Mihambo. After the training camp in Belek, an infection stopped Germany’s track and field star. “Almost two weeks of training were canceled. That can be made up again, but not in a week or two,” said coach Ulli Knapp, who also relies on an EM effect. “For me, the indoor season has almost a bit of a healing and motivating effect to work even harder, more concentrated and more intensively.”
“The competition never sleeps”
After the illness break, Knapp does not predict any top distances for the competition in Florence. “You can’t expect anything oversized there after the infection and the training break. It’s like technical training for us,” he said at the start of the season, in which Jamaican Ackelia Smith and Tara Davis-Woodhall from the USA were the first to win the seventh meter mark skipped. “The competition doesn’t sleep. It’s developing at a very high level and it looks like it’s going to be higher than last year,” said Knapp. “One year before the Olympics, everyone wants to position themselves.”
In his own words, Mihambo is not yet thinking about Paris 2024. After winning the 2019 and 2022 World Championships, she wants to achieve her best performance again at the World Championships from August 19th to 27th in Budapest. “The Olympics don’t matter yet,” she said. The World Cup hat-trick, which so far only the American Brittney Reese managed from 2009 to 2013, would be to Mihambo’s taste.
“Of course that would be very nice. I’ll definitely do my best – and then you can look at the competition. If it’s enough for gold again, I’ll be happy,” said Germany’s three-time athlete of the year.
Last year Mihambo with gold and the women’s sprint relay with bronze prevented a world championship zero number. At the EM summer fairy tale in Munich, she was only three centimeters away from the gold medal – weakened by a corona disease. Serbian Ivana Vuleta won with 7.06 meters. “I would like to attack again in the summer and hope that all the wheels will mesh even better,” said Mihambo, who was the only German athlete to have won a medal at the World Cup with the performances in Munich.
Behind Germany’s top athlete is an important year for the team around double European champion Gina Lückenkemper. The German Athletics Association wants to take the momentum of the European Championships with them and is already hoping for success from the structural reform this year. “For many athletes, this season is an important step towards the Olympic Games after Paris,” said Mihambo.