Felix Rijhnen at the Olympics: put on hold

How does the corona situation affect the nerves of athletes?

The German speed skaters have an example.

For Michelle Uhrig, the night ended at six o'clock on Tuesday.

The doping controllers knocked on the door, so loud and clear that not only the Berliner woke up.

"Michelle had a knock on the door this morning," her neighbor said during training that afternoon.

"And then the thoughts start: What is this now?

am i positive

Well, it was just a doping control.

Everything is easy."

Christopher Becker

sports editor.

• Follow I follow

Michelle Uhrig's neighbor is called Felix Rijhnen and is an interesting guy among the German Olympians because of his communication skills and for a number of other reasons.

Rijhnen is 31 years old and comes from Darmstadt, southern Hesse.

Darmstadt is an interesting place for a number of reasons, but is not well known as the center of German speed skating.

A big one on wheels

The fact that Rijhnen is now, in his fourth decade, appearing at the Olympic Games for the first time has mainly to do with two things: On the one hand, his relationship with the German Speed ​​Skating Association (DESG) had been cold for years, not least because of the center of his life there Hessian skid diaspora.

On the other hand, inline speed skating, the summer sport, is not an Olympic discipline.

Rijhnen is a two-time world champion and two-time European champion, has won two medals at the World Games in non-Olympic sports and 30 German championships.

On wheels he's a big one.

Rijhnen had never completely dismissed the idea of ​​ice.

But packed in a far-away back room, and the skates in a box in the basement.

"I could never part with it," said the police commissioner of the sports promotion group of the Hessian police when he returned by car from the training camp in Inzell in the week before departure for Beijing.

But until the winter of 2021, contact with the DESG was only about “what is not possible and why it is not possible.

There was six years of radio silence.” Until Rijhnen got two calls.

One from Matthias Große, President of DESG.

And one by Alexis Contin, who switched from the streets to the ice 15 years ago.

Grosse told him he would love to see him back on the ice.

And that he trusts him to qualify for the Olympics.

"It was a huge innovation for me," says Rijhnen.

The Frenchman Contin, who is well known to Rijhnen as an opponent on the street, informed him that he would become a base coach in Berlin.

"When he told me that he had a young, motivated training group in Germany, that made me curious.

Then came the offer to train and see how things went.

That was in January 2021, when I was struggling with the fact that the first races on inline skates for spring were canceled again.

I thought about it for two or three days and decided that I wanted to try it,” says Rijhnen.

Contin's employment in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen was not without criticism, if only because his wife Nadine Seidenglanz was initially the "general representative" of DESG President Große and has been the association's sports director since autumn 2021.

And greatness has its critics.

DESG athlete spokesman Moritz Geisreiter, for example, had denounced the management style of Claudia Pechstein's partner and complained about his invasive personnel policy.

About a year later, Felix Rijhnen is now in Beijing. Olympia. He also owes that, and above all, to the big ones. "He paved the way for me." At the World Cup in Calgary on the third weekend in Advent, Rijhnen finished third in the mass start race, a rare podium finish for the DESG. And at the same time the Olympic qualification. In Calgary he was also seventh fastest over 5000 meters, the time (6:12) was enough for an international quota place in Beijing.

This Sunday (9.30 a.m. CET in the FAZ live ticker about the Olympics, on ZDF and on Eurosport), Rijhnen and Patrick Beckert will be in the first men's Olympic race at the games.

But the mass start offers him more chances, if only because it is more similar to inline competitions, because through this experience he attributes “a good feeling for racing situations” – which enables technically inferior runners like him to make tactical variations.

In Calgary he was successful with a break away in the style of a professional cyclist.

And the 5000 meters?

"Only the top 20 in the world are allowed to start," says Rijhnen.

“To be alone in this elite circle is a great honor.

I want to get everything I can out of myself that day.” At the finish he doesn't want to feel “a grain of energy left” and then he's satisfied.

Until then, he'll walk through the Beijing bubble with wide eyes.

Everything new, everything impressive, everything also disturbing.

Like knocking on the door: "These are the things that make you nervous." And be extremely careful.

When he starts on Sunday, Rijhnen has already won a race.