The fastest man in the world and his inseparable coach tell Sportweek face to face: “Without him I wouldn’t have done it,” says Marcell. And Paolo is moved: “I love you, I never told you that”
We won’t dwell on the key role that a coach plays in the life of an athlete, let’s simply start from a fact: Paolo Camossi is much more than a coach, he has been the shadow of Marcell Jacobs since 2015, sometimes the lightning rod, often the spokesman. He doesn’t follow Marcell’s races, he suffers from watching Marcell’s races from the warm-up track or worse outside the stadium, like at Tokyo 2020 (which was summer 2021) when he stayed in front of the gates to (better) watch the race from the big screen and record it with the mobile phone, to then watch it again and again. He tells Marcell that “from the position he would have had on the pitch, he would not have followed the match well, in the heats and in the semifinals we had done so and he had performed well, and he stayed there to see the final too!”.