This was the mixed 4x400m relay at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (Les Jeux Olympiques d’été de 2024), an event largely dominated by American athletes. But the highlight of the Paris Olympics, for many, was with Femke Bol’s seemingly impossible sprint from 4th to 1st.
We missed this particular moment, but on Instagram the official Olympics account posted the clip recently and Bol’s comeback is phenomenal. Thus, we must discuss it!
Comeback Queen: Femke Bol is Very Bloody Fast
Bol makes a habit of doing these last gasp wins. She conserves energy until the final leg, steps it up a gear, and powers on to the finish line. Usually, that means everyone else is left exhausted (and very defeated) in her wake.
The 25-year-old Dutch athlete is 6ft and uses her power to generate a hell of a lot of speed. Two facts here:
- Bol ran the final split in 47.93 seconds
- She averaged out at 18.67mph
It’s a 400 metre sprint, meaning the runners have to just give it everything for the full 400m and the pressure builds on the “anchor leg” (the final sprint of the relay). Starting her run in 4th and with about 12 metres to make up, you can see her style kicking in off the final corner.
English runner Amber Anning (now 25) was in 2nd, with American sprinter Kaylyn Brown (now 20) out front. Now, those two are world class runners and they’re also going full pelt.
Where Bol excels is her power and stamina. In the final stages, you can see Anning and Brown start to lag ever so slightly. Meanwhile, Bol just powers past them at breakneck speed with zero signs of fatigue.
And that is the difference! A tiny extra edge of performance.
The Illusion of Effortlessness: How Femke Bol is So Fast
The 2024 Olympics win was a big deal for Bol, a kind of a revenge thing. As at the 2023 World Athletics Championships she had the above nasty fall whilst battling it out with the US for the win.
That was a rare mistake. Bol went off and worked harder on her style and came back even stronger.
She’s now pretty much the most impressive female runner out there, feared by everyone for her relentless stamina. But as you can see, her trademark style is conserving energy until the final run and then powering past her competitors.
That or, seemingly as the most casual thing in the world, breaking her own world record when it didn’t look like she was even trying. This was up against her Dutch teammate Lieke Klaver (who was very happy to see Bol win that way, great bit of genuine happiness there).
When you’ve got a genius like this in action, they do make it look easy. We follow F1 very closely and your Max Verstappens, Sir Lewis Hamiltons, and Michael Schumachers make/made other world class drivers look woefully inadequate in comparison.
In football, you’ve got Maradona or Pelé. Tennis and it’s the Williams sisters, Djokovic, or Federer.
Away from sport, we follow drumming and our now retired favourite (The Stone Roses’ Reni) was also on a different planet with his abilities. He was noted for his physics-defying playing, which seemed utterly effortless for him.
It isn’t easy, of course, it’s all down to lots of training, experience, and an innate natural ability the prior areas help to unlock. The Guardian did a feature on Bol’s sudden rise to fame in June 2024: Why Femke Bol could be the sublime star of the Paris Olympics:
“Such is the grace and talent of the Dutch hurdler and sprinter she appears to have the ability to bend time to her will – as well as a rare beauty in her technique …
While it didn’t seem physically possible for Bol to make up all the necessary ground, the duration of each second somehow expanded – even as the distance to the finishing line shrank – so that more and more could be accomplished within it. There was more time and space even as less of both remained! With her lengthy, easy, unforced stride – a stride that seemed to meet not with resistance but active encouragement each time a foot touched the track – Bol was clearly gaining on Yeargin. Might she even catch Williams? It was tactical, everything needed to be perfectly judged, but a sense of inevitability began to manifest itself: a feeling that wherever the line might be Bol would get there first. And she did, flowing past Williams with just 0.16 of a second between them.”
Her height seems to help. At 6ft that’s a big old stride, which her coach (the Swiss trainer Laurent Meuwly) used to teach her a “cruising” style of running over the first 200 metres. This helped improve her stride technique by 12cm over time.
The other part is natural endurance. Very bloody quick at full sprint, but the capacity to not drop in speed towards the end of a race. That and her mental resilience (coming back stronger after the fall in 2023) and you’ve got an Olympic Gold Medal winner right here.
All of this whilst being a very affable and likeable young lady. She’s softly spoken and has a big goofy, engaging grin matched by casual self-deprecation.
However! Bol has recently stunned the athletics world by announcing her move into the 800 metres. That’s a very big deal, apparently, that could shake up the whole sport. Huzzah!
