Karsten Warholm (27) feels gigantic.
So much so that it blows everything up.
Warholm is an essential athlete and a Norwegian cyclone who moves with multi-jumps, bouncing both in the 400 sprint and in the hurdles, and runaway launches from the 6th street towards the free street, he wants the runway open like the plane that takes off in the airport.
And it takes off so much that the 200 passes in 2085 seconds, and five meters behind is Óscar Husillos (29), the Astudillo Express, who passes fourth and sees how the Norwegian walks away while thinking to himself:
"That's committing suicide!"
And Husillos doesn't think about anything else, he doesn't have time, because he crossed that pass in 21.64 seconds and he's in a hurry and now everything hurts and he has concentrated on Carl Bengtström's legs, the only obstacle that separates him from the podium, fourth continental podium that he would have picked up.
-How angry this is. But of course, I had screwed up in the first round, when I let Krsek get the better of me. And since then, I've always been on the wrong foot,” says Husillos, who finished fourth, in 46s24, half a second behind Bengtström's bronze (45s77).
But we revisit the race, Warholm's crazed flight.
Perhaps the Norwegian has believed himself invincible, like his compatriot Jakob Ingebrigtsen, gold in the 1,500 and this Sunday the only favorite for the 3,000 gold (“If he is a monster, if he is not human”, Adel Mechaal said yesterday, that is how he sees him his only rival of weight...), but this time he goes very far in his madness.
Chasing the novamás, the title and the world record, Warholm shoots himself in the foot and feels faint on the last straight, his legs swell and lactic acid rises, and he crashes in the last meters, when Julien Watrin (45s44), another Belgian, what a small school of four hundred these people have, they pounce on him and force even the paintings.
And Warholm finally wins, in 45s35, who throws himself as the scorer looking for the test, sticking his chest in, and in his momentum he takes Watrin himself, both scratch themselves on the synthetic.
"If I have seen them from behind, I have seen that neither of them arrived," says Óscar Husillos.
And he declares himself an upset spectator: he understands that the podium had been difficult for him in the run-up to the 400, being second in the series and meeting Warholm in the semifinal, and now he seeks consolation in the long relay, this same Sunday, where he did not He will be accompanied by the injured Iñaki Cañal and Manuel Guijarro, but by the consolidated Lucas Búa and the youngsters (as Husillos affectionately calls them) Markel Fernández and David García.
–There is desire and there is adrenaline, and the buds are focused –says Husillos, who speaks and while speaking starts the final of the women's 400, where another star flies, Femke Bol.
Femke Bol (23) is the new heroine of Dutch athletics, that speed academy that in other times had given us Fanny Blankers-Koen, Nelli Cooman and Dafne Schippers and that now, relying on Bol, has considered erasing from the tables the unsympathetic records of the Cold War.
So be it.
What a winter this Bol spends, a teenager with refined technique, a foot that glides like a skater's, an athlete who is as good for the 400 as the 400 hurdles, even for the 800, as he already ventures out there, since he is neither big nor is he accelerated nor is it muscular.
The chronicler contemplates her in the Ataköy Arena and soon identifies the asymmetries: impossible to find a similarity between Bol and Jarmila Kratochvilova, the forceful Czechoslovakian who 41 years ago had signed 49.59s, and who has spent all this time at the top of the podium, all this time until the irruption of Bol
(Two weeks ago, the Dutch signed 49s26, already in the prelude to the sub 49s).
Kratochvilova was watts, a disproportionate display of strength that connected her with the stars of the time: Florence Griffith, Marita Koch...
Bowl is something else.
–Bol plays in another league, like Madrid in the Champions League! says Husillos, who packs up and leaves, dying of laughter, while the chronicler watches the parade of the Dutch woman, gold in 49s85.
Flota Bol.
He crosses the 200 in 23s78, in the lead as Warholm had done, but regulates better and on top of that he is behind his squire, Lieke Klaver, also Dutch, who covers his back and finishes silver (50s57), silver like Marcell Jacobs (6s50) , the Italian of speed, the new Bolt, who is playing injured at 60, with a hamstring made of chrome, and falls again before Samuele Ceccarelli, an unknown man who has revealed himself this winter (6s48).
