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Saskia Aleythe and Johannes Knuth
If you can run fast, you don’t have to be in bed earlier than others. It was a long evening on the last Olympic athletics weekend in the National Stadium in Tokyo, many medals still had to be handed out. And at half past one in the morning, the winners of the 4×100 meter relay were called to the press conference: Team Italy. A reporter from France wanted to know very soon what had actually happened: Five gold medals for Italy’s athletics in Tokyo – how do you explain that? “It’s a miracle,” said the sprinter Filippo Tortu, he had put on the national flag and was still excited. In any case, with such supernatural events, Tortu said: “You cannot explain a miracle.”