The rain doesn’t stop. Lindy Ave is at the start and looks into the curve. The stadium round lies ahead of her, the next final of her career. This time over 400 meters at the Paralympics in Tokyo.
After the starting gun, she doesn’t run off hastily. The long sprint is the toughest discipline in athletics because in no other discipline you have to endure breathlessness for so long. But Lindy Ave seems to be in control. Others do not keep up their pace. She already. It leads on the home stretch, and the strength is sufficient. Victory in 1: 00.00 minute. World record for the T38 sports class. Lindy Ave is sitting on the train in the pounding rain between the puddles and panting.
“I would never have thought that in my life,” she says later. “It’s always a challenge to get into the final at all.” And the weather? “Oh well.” She smiles. “You’re used to rainy weather anyway if you live by the Baltic Sea.”
Lindy Ave (right) keeps walking as the rain keeps pattering down.
(Photo: Athit Perawongmetha / Reuters)
Lindy Ave, 23, spastically paralyzed sprinter from Greifswald, won the 13th Paralympic gold for the German para-sports association DBS on Saturday evening in the Tokyo National Stadium. It improved a balance sheet that Chef de Mission Karl Quade had already praised at the final press conference that afternoon. The beginning was slow, but then came the successes. “The second week worked,” said Quade. The team was smaller, as was the number of medals, and before the final Sunday the Germans were in eleventh place in the medal table, not in the top ten as hoped. But Quade and DBS President Friedhelm Julius Beucher didn’t want to be petty. They preferred to be happy about the many top performances that the nominees had achieved.
Felix Streng didn’t want to finish second – he wanted to prove something
The DBS cut was not ideal. Team sports, for example, seem to be a construction site. The wheelchair basketball players lost their bronze game against the USA 51:64 – so there was nothing countable for German teams in Tokyo. On the plus side, on the other hand, it says: Young people have won, above all the visually impaired swimmer Taliso Engel, 19, who won over 100 meters chest with a world record of 1: 02.97 minutes during the week. Or just Lindy Ave. Or the prosthesis sprinter Felix Streng, 26, who won gold in the 100 meters of his sport class in 10.76 seconds on Monday and over 200 meters in silver in 21.78 seconds on Saturday. Streng’s success story is a very unique one in the world of DBS.
Felix Streng doesn’t look happy after the award ceremony. He has the silver medal around his neck. Nevertheless. “I have no idea what was going on.” He didn’t really want to finish second. After the run-up in the morning he had a good feeling. A very good one. “I thought I can fly today.” But then: “I pulled my adductor fully while warming up, I couldn’t even put my shoe on properly in the callroom.” The way he tells it, it’s a wonder he was able to walk in the first place. “I can’t even lift my leg right now.” He says: “That’s a disappointment.”
As the first to cross the finish line: Felix Streng (left) in the 100 meter final. Johannes Floors (right) is third.
(Photo: Joel Marklund / imago)
Streng probably also wanted the one-two because he wanted to prove something. For he took a bold step. At the end of 2020 he left the para-athletics team at Bayer Leverkusen, in which he had trained for years with highly decorated people such as Johannes Floors, David Behre and Markus Rehm. He switched to the Wetzlar sprint team. And: He moved to London to work with sprint coach Steve Fudge, who led Olympic athletes like Adam Gemili and James Dasaolu to times under ten seconds.
Moving abroad educates. However, the separation does not seem to have been quite harmonious. “Unfortunately Felix left behind a bit of scorched earth,” said Johannes Floors after the 100-meter final, in which he was third behind Streng. Floors, who won the 400m gold on Friday, added that he still got on well with Strict. But Streng does not understand why the scorched earth sentence had to be dropped at all. Why this negative energy? And when you ask him whether he feels he is being adequately supported by the DBS, he says: “Very difficult question.” He started for the German association, he made decisions himself. It sounds like that didn’t go down well.
Streng can philosophize about sprinting in a winning way
“In other sports it’s normal for people to go abroad. I think that para-sport has to become more open,” says Streng it works. That’s why I would like a little more support in the next few years. ” There weren’t any before Tokyo? “Yes, yes,” says Streng quickly. “But of course it was all a bit more complicated.”
Streng can philosophize about sprinting in a winning way. What he likes about Coach Fudge is that he is a tinkerer, an explorer of the race and its powers. “I come to training with a very good physique, so it’s very interesting what happens when you work with a trainer who is so biomechanical,” says Streng. “We are currently working on the position in which the body can bring how much energy onto the track.” He likes this training in detail.
This is not a criticism of the Leverkusen methods. More like a statement for the interest in new ideas. New ideas have never harmed German sport – if it has allowed them to. In any case, the gold sprinter Streng is on his way. At the end of the Paralympics he says: “I’m looking forward to the future.”