Suddenly millions are watching her painful Letzigrund performance: Swiss sprinter Gutschmidt goes viral with her mistake

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She is already in the middle of the new season, but now Melissa Gutschmidt (22) is involved in an event from last year. A video of the Lausanne woman as the final runner in the relay at the world-class meeting in Zurich is currently going viral. It has been viewed over 47 million times so far!

Blick reached the sprinter at the training camp in southern Turkey, where she was working for the World Relay Championships in the Bahamas, the European Championships in Rome and the Olympic Games in Paris. About the internet hype, she says: “It’s just unbelievable. I have gained many new followers in recent days.”

A tragicomic role in the final sprint of the season

The sprinter from Lausanne says that she has also read many reactions. “The people are very nice and when they notice that I can laugh about it too, they laugh too.”

You should know: The 2023 U23 European Championship bronze winner involuntarily plays a tragicomic role in the video of the final sprint of the 4×100 meter relay. The 1.55 meter tall Vaudois races towards victory, but is overtaken at the last moment and overtaken by the 1.84 meter tall Dutch Tasa Jiya (26). The size difference between the two seems surreal and somehow unfair. And because it also seems that Jiya will bump into the Swiss shortly before the finish and Gutschmidt will fall violently as a result, her hearts now fly out to her.

Gutschmidt owes the internet hype to a Turk. It is Enez Özen who digs up the scene again. Özen has nothing to do with athletics. However, according to his own description, he has one of the twenty most influential X-profiles in Turkey and regularly posts funny, entertaining or bizarre videos. “I publish positive video content,” Özen says about himself – and about Gutschmidt’s final sprint he simply writes: “Great race.”

The opponent became an enemy online

Now the 19-second film is a mega hit. But Gutschmidt laughs because she doesn’t remember the race so bizarrely and analyzes it coolly: “The passing of the baton was not entirely ideal and in the last meters I felt the fatigue of the long season.” And the bump? It didn’t even exist. Gutschmidt: “She didn’t touch me, I tripped myself. I feel sorry for Jiya because a lot of negative comments have been made about her.”

She is used to being noticed because of her height (1.55 meters). «I am happy with my size. “I’m very fast at the start because I can run at a high frequency,” says Gutschmidt. Sprint icon Shally-Ann Fraser-Pryce (37) was just as small.

Gutschmidt started the Olympic season quickly: with the Swiss U23 record at the Indoor SM (7.20 seconds), she won silver among active athletes and thus a starting place at the World Indoor Championships, which was not the goal at all.

Source : Blick