Rebekka continues to show great progress

Machine-translated from Faroese and not yet reviewed. Read the original.

There were 11 women in the 1,500 metres this evening. Among them was Rebekka Fuglø, who has improved a great deal over this distance in the past six months. Whether the improvement was big enough for her to call herself a medal contender was, however, rather doubtful. After her coach, Guttorm Sørensen, had studied the other participants in great detail, he judged that this would be a very even race with strong runners, but without any clear favourite for gold.

They ran very close together for the first 1,100 metres, and Rebekka was well in contention at that point

It was also clear straight away that the runners respected one another. No one dared to push the pace. Rebekka sat at the back of the tight pack the whole way, which ran at a little under 3:20 pace for the first laps. Not until 1,000 metres did the first woman have to let go. The time then was about 3:16, and the field was still tightly bunched. Then they went out on the last lap and the pace kept increasing. But still the field would not break up, and Rebekka was still hanging on at the back. And so the whole field went gasping in one long line towards the finish. Rebekka finished in 9th place, which doesn’t sound like much. But she was only five seconds off the gold medal, and she had also improved her own time by a full 5 seconds. Her time was 4:44.15.

Here Rebekka runs the final metres on her way to a new personal best, which is now 4:44.15 min.

At 13 years old, Rebekka set a Faroese record over 1,500 metres when she ran 5:10 min in Gothenburg. Since then Bjørk Herup Olsen has improved it a few times, so that today it stands at 4:37.83. Six months ago Rebekka’s best time was 5:05 min, so it must be said that she has really found her stride again. It will therefore be exciting to see how she gets on when she runs in the 800 metres heats on Wednesday morning.