With this year’s European Athletics Championships in Amsterdam less than seven weeks away, we delve back in time again – to August 1998, the European Championships in Budapest and a record from a brilliant Frenchwoman that still stands.
It was the perfect two days any sprinter could have asked for.In the heats of the women’s 100m at the Nepstadion, Christine Arron qualified in a respectable 11.12 before, 24 hours later, writing her way into the history of the European Athletics Championships.
First came the semi-finals, where Arron sent out a powerful message of what was to follow by breaking the championship record with 10.81 and then in the final, she produced the performance of her life.
Running out of lane five, Arron rose with the pack as the gun fired even though she was not the quickest to break.
From lane three, Russia’s Irina Privalova, the defending champion, seized the initiative, determined to hang on to her title.
At 40 metres, it looked like Privalova was going to stretch away but as the race reached the maximum velocity stage, and without hardly breaking out of the elegant stride that was so much her style, Arron just took off.
Powering through from fifth, she swept the field away, crossing the line in a sensational 10.73.
Never mind she had broken the championship record again, her time had smashed the European record of 10.77 held by Privalova.
It brought her victory by 0.10 from the Russian, a huge margin in such a quick race, particularly when the Frenchwoman was so far behind, with Greece’s Ekaterina Thanou in third in 10.87, a national record.
Now Arron had a gold medal to match her tight, golden locks and how she relished punching the air in delight as she hit the line.
Such was the impact of the run that in the 17 years since, only Bulgaria’s Ivet Lalova-Collio has come closest to breaking it with 10.77 in 2004 while the Netherlands’ Dafne Schippers is edging towards it after her 10.81 last summer in winning silver at the IAAF World Championships in Beijing.
Arron, who remains fifth on the all-time world list, then ran a brilliant anchor leg to lead France’s women to 4x100m relay gold at the Championships in a career where she won nine major medals including a world relay title in Paris 2003 and a European relay silver in Barcelona 2010 - 12 years after her Budapest glory.
She was still competing in 2012 at the age of 38, leading France to fifth in the relay and just missing out on the semi-finals of the 100m at the European Athletics Championships in Helsinki.
At the end of that year she announced her retirement and now a mum of two, she bowed out with 30 French records to her name and quite a story to tell her children from that Hungarian summer of 1998.
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European Athletics Championships 1998, Budapest
19 August, 100m Final1. Christine Arron (Fra) 10.73
2. Irina Privalova (Rus) 10.83
3. Ekaterini Thanou (Gre) 10.87
22 August, 4x100m Final
1. France (Katia Benth, Frederique Bangue, Sylviane Felix, Arron) 42.59
2. Germany (Melanie Paschke, Gabi Rockmeier, Birgit Rockmeier, Andrea Philipp) 42.68
3. Russia (Oksana Ekk, Galina Malchugina, Natalya Voronova, Privalova) 42.73