World Championships in Athletics: Women’s relay wins bronze STERN.de

The German sprint quartet with Tatjana Pinto, Alexandra Burghardt, Gina Lückenkemper and Rebekka Haase won the first German medal at the World Championships in Athletics in Eugene. Over the 4×100 meters, the relay surprisingly came third on Saturday (local time) with 42.03 seconds and took bronze. Gold went to the USA in 41.14 seconds, who finished 0.04 seconds ahead of Jamaica for world 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and world 200m champion Shericka Jackson. Javelin thrower Julian Weber, on the other hand, missed a medal again in fourth place.

“It feels like a dream right now, I hope I don’t wake up,” said Pinto on ZDF. “We’ve wished for it so often, and today we did it,” Burghardt commented on the success. She had won silver as a brakewoman in bobsleigh at the Winter Olympics in February and said ahead of the upcoming European Championships in Munich: “Now we’re still missing gold.” Germany’s best sprinter, Gina Lückenkemper, said: “We talked about the luck of the fit, and today it was with us. Finally, finally!” Last runner Haase had secured third place on the home stretch.

World Athletics Championships: Relay medal should be “jerk”.

“The medal is a sensation. You would have expected the men to do that. That’s the push we needed,” said DLV President Jürgen Kessing of the German Press Agency. The German men’s relay with Kevin Kranz, Joshua Hartmann, Owen Ansah and Lucas Ansah-Peprah, who had performed well before the World Cup, had missed the finals because of two failed handovers.

For a German 4×100 meter relay, it was the first medal since bronze at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. At that time, Marion Wagner, Anne Cibis, Cathleen Tschirch and Verena Sailer finished behind Jamaica and the Bahamas. A year ago it was enough at the Olympic Games in the same line-up as now in the USA for fifth place.