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Gina Lückenkemper (center) opened her race season on Wednesday in Espoo. LEHTIKUVA / Markku Ulander
Germany’s fastest woman Gina Lückenkemper opened her competition season in the first hundred meters of the Espoo gp race by running to a winning time of 11.44. It fell short of the record for a European silver medalist a couple of years ago by almost half a second and made Lückenkemper laugh.
– It felt like I had forgotten almost everything I could. I guess I enjoyed the atmosphere at the start a bit too much and I was probably the last one to come off the starting racks. Everything I focused on in the warm-up was left undone. But it comes with a race routine. I haven’t competed in almost a year, Lückenkemper chuckled after the race.
The trip to Finland was Lückenkemper’s first trip abroad after the start of the corona pandemic.
– This was the first time in six months that I was on a plane.
Over the course of the spring, Lückenkemper had to improvise in his practice.
– Fortunately, the restrictions on our movement in Germany did not prevent us from leaving the apartment and moving around, but I was still without a stadium and a weight room for a month in the spring because they were closed. It wasn’t optimal, so I improvised by running in the woods, and the neighbors even offered their gardens for my practice use.
The German championship will take place next weekend, but Lückenkemper will not compete before the Monte Carlo Diamond League.
– I will fly back home tomorrow morning, and on top of that the race on Saturday would be too much. This was difficult to plan because sometimes we had the knowledge that the German Championships would not be held at all.