The European 400m hurdles record holder Femke Bol outlined her plans for 2022 and confirmed that the 2022 Continental Athletics Championships in Munich are part of her schedule for this summer.
The World Cup in July is her main goal, where she will hope to improve on her bronze medal at last summer’s Olympics, where she broke the European record to 52.03 sec in an exciting final that ended with a world record by American Sydney McLaughlin.
“This is the most important tournament and I hope to be the best there. At the European Championships I hope to hold this peak and show another good performance”, said the 21-year-old “Rising Star” of European Athletics in an interview.
No representative of the Netherlands has won a medal in the 400m hurdles at the European Championships, so Femke Bol has the additional motivation to try to challenge the championship record of 52.92 sec, set by Russian Natalia Antyukh in 2010.
And if Femke Bol triumphs in Munich this summer, she will retain the title in her training group, as the gold medal in Berlin 2018 went to the already retired Lea Sprunger from Switzerland, who also trained with Laurent Meuwly.
She hopes that improvements in her pre-summer hurdles technique – and the ability to maintain a 15-step hurdles model for longer – will make her go even faster with the 52-second barrier as an extra purpose.
“If you improve one hundredth (of a second) in your technique, that’s one-tenth, obtained after ten hurdles; it would mean for me that I would run in 51 seconds”, added Femke Bol, noting that she felt her technique was not as sophisticated as that of the two American runners, Sydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammad, who finished ahead of her in Tokyo.
Femke Bol also intends to take part in the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade in March, where he will compete in the 400m.
She won the European title in a two-lap race on the track in Torun, Poland last year, when she set a national record of 50.63 sec and looks set to have a very good chance of winning another gold in the Serbian capital.
