Images: Roger Sedres / ImageSA & Reg Caldecott |
Elation, disappointment, elation … that about sums up the Carina Horn’ s first few months of 2018. In February she bettered the SA Indoor Record for 60m twice, first clocking 7.10 seconds to finally beat Wendy Hartman’ s 7.15 SA Record, which had stood since 1999, and then two days later she took another hundredth of a second off the record.“ We worked hard on improving my speed over the first 20 metres, as that was where I always lost out in races,” she says about the hard work she put in with her Austrian coach Rainer Schopf. That meant she arrived at the World Indoor Champs in Birmingham in the first week of March ranked joint eighth on the then IAAF indoor rankings, meaning she had a realistic chance of making the final at the Champs.“ It has always been my goal to compete in a major final, but the statistics were sort of against me. Times of 11.15 in the 100 or 7.19 over 60 metres had never been good enough to qualify for the big finals. Now was the first time that according to the statistics I had a realistic chance to go through to the final eight,” says Carina.
She posted an opening run of 7.23 in the first round, finishing second in her heat and thus qualifying automatically for the semi-final round. Eight hours later Carina lined up again, knowing that another toptwo finish would put her in her first major final. Failing
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that, she had to run one of the two‘ fastest loser’ times outside of the top two positions to go through. Mujinga Kambundji of Switzerland won that third and final semi in 7.10, but it required acute photo-finish analysis to determine whether Carolle Zahi or Carina had clinched second place. Heartbreakingly for Carina, the Frenchwoman was given a time of 7.17 to her 7.18, which meant she missed an automatic berth in the final by just one hundredth of a second! Worse news was to follow: Her time also put her just three one-hundredths of a second behind the second‘ fastest loser’ time of 7.15.
In spite of her disappointment, the result in Birmingham just spurred Carina on, and she immediately said she would be gunning for the outright SA Record over 100m at the SA Track and Field Champs two weeks later, on her home track in Pretoria. She had been co-holder of the outdoor record since 2015, having equalled Evette De Klerk’ s 11.06 time that had stood since 1990, but on 15 March, Carina blitzed down the home straight in 11.03 to finally remove that 28-year-old record from top spot on the list. And she believes she can go still faster.“ I know now that I am capable of dipping under
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Hard at work to achieve her goals |
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