It no longer tingles. Claudia Salman-Rath has finished her sporting career. The all-around meeting this weekend in Götzis, which is decisive for the Olympic qualification, will be followed by the 35-year-old. "But probably only on a small screen and behind my son's back," she says. Jakob, born in September 2020, is now in the foreground with his mother. It is difficult for her to leave the offspring to someone else for even an hour, admits the long-time athlete from Frankfurt Eintracht. "I'm even more of a mom than I thought."
That alone is not the reason why the third of the 2017 European Indoor Championships in the long jump decided not to start again. At least she would have liked to say goodbye with a farewell tour. “I always wanted to decide for myself when to stop,” she says. But the left knee doesn't stop hurting even after two operations. First attempts to get fit for jumps again by jogging ended disappointingly in March. “The danger is too great that something will happen,” says Salman-Rath. "I still want to be able to run after my child in ten years."
In order to get the joint in order, the cartilage of which was badly damaged after so many units and the hard training for her long-standing main discipline heptathlon, Salman-Rath had a personal best of 6.94 meters and canceled a double start at the World Championships in London.
She wanted to take part unencumbered for a second Olympic participation after her 14th place in Rio. "If I had known I wouldn't be coming back, I might have postponed the operation for a year and had one last season in the long jump," she says. After two seasons that were missed due to injuries, the fourth place in the World Championship in the heptathlon in Moscow in 2013, who then missed precious metal by just one second in the final 800-meter run, once again hoped for a last major competition.
Due to the 2020 Tokyo Games being postponed by a year, she wanted to attack again.
But the birth was difficult;
Because of the pandemic, there were hardly any training opportunities.
"The fitness studios were closed and I wouldn't have had time to go to Frankfurt regularly," says the Darmstadt resident.
Taking your baby with you to practice was out of the question: "He's a bright little boy," she says.
Instead of sleeping most of the time, as others had predicted, Jakob wanted to be kept busy all the time.
Salman-Rath wrote one last all-around competition last December.
She kept the individual discipline in the back of her mind for a while.
Then she gave up.
Longing for normal life
"I had a really nice career," the former German champion sums up. She owes a lot to her coaches Jürgen Sammert and Uli Knapp; "They have always brought me out of the lows". Now the social work student longs for a normal life. When Jakob goes to the crèche in autumn, the trained educator wants to write her bachelor thesis and look for a job that does not stress her emotionally too much. “I am a sensitive one,” says Salman-Rath.
She keeps in shape with inline skating and yoga. Götzis did not write off the multiple participant either. When she was still at the start in Austria, her parents always spent a few days of vacation there with her after the hardships. Salman-Rath can well imagine this for the future, combined with the tingling sensation that one feels as a spectator of the cult event.