The start of the season was a disaster.

Christina Schwanitz brought a rain jacket and waterproof boots to the first Diamond League meeting in Gateshead in the north of England in May.

As feared, it poured out of buckets.

“Ice would have been worse,” jokes the shot putter.

She does not say a word about the fact that the best of her four valid hits was only 17.86 meters: last place in the competition.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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Because it got a lot worse. Christina Schwanitz was recovering from a herniated disc back in May; her main concern was to get going again. She sustained the injury at the European Indoor Championships in Toruń at the beginning of March when she lost 19.04 meters in the last attempt and won the bronze medal. More than fifty athletes and supervisors, at least seven of them Germans, returned from Poland with a corona infection. Christina Schwanitz, on the other hand, traveled home with a deaf right arm and a deaf right hand. No one thought that she could push the four-pound iron ball up to twenty meters.

For the pain, she took 1200 ibuprofen, "an elephant roar," as she says. But it didn't help. Neurologists eventually recommended injecting cortisone into the affected area. The result was the same as that for many of the infected: bed rest. Christina Schwanitz spent it on the couch and tried to keep fit with gymnastics.

The experienced athlete, 35 years old, is running out of time. “It is not easy to be at the forefront at the age of 36,” says her trainer Sven Lang. The two prepared intensively for Gateshead. “We're finally starting again,” she believed. By car from Chemnitz to Berlin, by plane to Newcastle, anger about a test that was too late - she arrived at the athletes' hotel late at night. And only there, at two in the morning, did she learn that Germany had declared Great Britain a mutation area the day before and that, back at home, she would have to go into quarantine for two weeks. That meant: no training and no start at the German championship in Braunschweig, where she wanted to dispel any last doubts about qualifying for her fourth Olympic Games.The athlete took isolation so seriously that she slept in the basement in order to avoid exposing her husband and children to any risk.

"I love my shot put"

During this time they got the news of the unexpected death of their former manager and the death of their grandfather.

When, practically from strength training, she took part in a competition in Bad Liebenzell in the Black Forest, it was more frustration than confirmation: four invalid attempts and one shot at 18.11 meters - for the 2015 world champion, which used to be year after year Exceeded twenty meters, an indisputable achievement.

At the beginning of July she returned to the ring from the training camp in South Tyrol at the Diamond League meeting in Stockholm. That it exceeded the Olympic standard of 18.40 meters with a width of 18.59 meters was irrelevant. Time was up. The strongest shot put far and wide is still a member of the Olympic team thanks to third places at the European Indoor Championships in Toruń this year and at the World Championships in Doha 2019, where she reached 19.17 meters. Last Friday, around the corner from home, in Thum in the Ore Mountains, she reached 18.63 meters - the best performance of the season and a sign of hope to finally reach 19 meters again in Tokyo.

Why all the trouble, all the trouble after 25 years of sport? “I love my shot put,” says the strong woman who is 1.80 meters long. “Feeling the ball in my hand and on my neck is passion for me, it makes me feel at home.” One day she wanted to be able to look back on her life and say: “I have been to the Olympic Games four times. Some only make it once. ”Unlike the world championships where she won gold, silver and bronze, she always returned from the summer games empty-handed. Beijing 2008 was the first time. She had five operations on her feet and traveled to China with screws in her body. She was eleventh. She contested London 2012 even though the tendon in her right arm was almost torn: tenth place. In Rio de Janeiro 2016 she competed as world and European champion,but a day and a half before the competition she found out about her best friend's suicide. “That got me off my hinges,” she recalls. She was highly favored sixth.

Quickly there, quickly away

So now Tokyo is about to play games, which due to the pandemic will probably be missing everything that makes the Olympics.

Quickly there, quickly away, this is how the International Olympic Committee and the organizers in Japan imagine it for the participants.

Christina Schwanitz would have postponed the games to Paris in 2024, Paris to Los Angeles in 2028, and so on, if she had been able to determine.

Who knows, maybe after the joyless games in Japan she will want to look ahead to a festival in Bavaria: the European Championships in Munich 2022 with the European Athletics Championships in the 1972 Olympic Stadium with the famous tent roof. She will decide on that when she looks back with her husband and children on her birthday on Christmas Eve on her athletic career and this damned year 2021.