Festival dello Sport, Jacobs: “I’m not superman, but I have Bolt in my sights”

From our correspondent Simone Battaggia

September 22
– trento

“I’m not Superman. I am a child raised in normalcy, I gave everything for my dream and it was not easy, when friends went out I knew what my task was, on July 20 with everyone on Lake Garda and 40 degrees I was on the track training . I sweated my path, but it has given me so much and I like to share it, to say that we must not give up when faced with the first difficulty “. This is how Marcell Jacobs talks about himself in front of the stalls of the Santa Chiara auditorium.

Key year

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A year later he returned to the Trento Festival to tell about an important 2022, which made him grow. After the 2021 of the Olympic drunkenness, of the historic double gold on the 100 and with the 4×100, a season marked by two golds has arrived – the 60 at the Indoor World Championships and the 100 at the Outdoor European Championships – and by the physical problems that kept it away from the World Cup final. “A lot of things have happened this year – he attacks -. And then yes, I also got married ”. Why it was a pivotal year, Jacobs explains it as follows: “Some people thought that what I did at the Games was a stroke of luck. I wanted to prove at all costs that it wasn’t. The Indoor World Championships were the most important, even more than the Olympics: I wanted to show that I had deserved that gold in Tokyo. I arrived in shape at the moment when it mattered most, I won and set the European record, in spite of those who were rowing against “. to spring, from indoor to outdoor races. Marcell is fine when he goes to Nairobi in May, to look for the weather. “Everything seemed ok, warmup all right, but then I felt bad. I was hospitalized for the first time in my life. It was a rotavirus, which sticks to the muscles and stays in the body for six months. I carried these problems for the rest of the season. Maybe I was wrong in wanting to return immediately, I had lost 4 kg and a half in those three days in the hospital, when I resumed at at I hurt myself. ” Until the recovery for the Europeans. “I arrived with little training, but I still did two very good races. In the semifinal I could also have run 9 ”85, but I had to save myself. This has loaded me up for next year, which will be very important ”.

The future

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Jacobs is not afraid to talk about the future but it is his coach Paolo Camossi who gives substance to the theme: “There is a world gold missing from his palmares – explains the coach – and then I have been trying to make him run the 200 for two years”. “Next year we will run some 200s – Marcell replies – and for 2024 at the European Championships I will run 100 and 200”. On the screen there is the graphic that reconstructs the history of the world record of 100, up to Bolt’s 9 ”58 in 2009:“ You have to be realistic and dream – sketches Camossi -. The work is going well, even if to say that we train to beat Bolt is a stretch ”. “I think so,” Jacobs makes clear. “You are the muscle and I am the mind – Camossi replies with a smile -. Seriously, we try to be better and better. The greats of athletics say he runs very well. Dreaming is lawful “.