Karsten Warholm’s revenge quest on track

Changing the game: Starting fast is central to Warholm’s approach to the 400m hurdles, which differs from the conventional method of building rhythm through a race and finishing it quicker than you started. | Photo credit: Getty Images

Main-event attraction: Warholm’s aggression, success and swagger have made him one of athletics’ biggest stars. | Photo credit: Getty Images

It was an unusual evening’s work for Karsten Warholm last Sunday. 

The Olympic champion in the 400m hurdles warmed up in a parking garage in downtown Stockholm so that he could arrive “dry and warm coming to the start” at the Diamond League event. In addition to a cool, rainy evening — not ideal conditions to run flat out in — he had to contend with something he would never have simulated in training: environmental protesters.

They knelt on the track about eight metres from the finish line, holding two banners that spanned from lanes one to six, forcing runners to break through them. Warholm, running in lane eight, had no barrier in his way but seemed distracted, with a fourth apparent protester squatting in lane seven seeming to photograph the incident. He was visibly angry with the protesters as they were led away while spectators booed. His winning time on a wet evening was 47.57 seconds, understandably outside his 45.94 world record set at the Tokyo Olympics two years ago.

After expressing his displeasure at the interruption — “It is permissible to protest, but this is not the way to do it,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK — Warholm assessed the performance which brought him a second win in a row, following the Oslo Diamond League. “I felt very good before the start, but the conditions make it a little bit more challenging,” he said. “I felt I had to post another good time, so I am very pleased. I am 100% exactly where I want to be.”

The memory remains

Where Warholm wants to be is in a position to regain the world title this year and break his own world record again. In an injury-plagued 2022 season, he lost at the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon; a win would have given him a hat-trick of world crowns. It’s a defeat that still rankles, a loss that angered him so much that he is determined to avenge it.

Warholm had walked into Eugene with a question mark over his head after suffering a hamstring tear the previous month. He led coming into the home straight but seized up badly and eventually finished seventh (48.42), with Brazilian rival and Tokyo bronze medallist Alison Dos Santos winning in a blazing-fast 46.29 seconds, the third-best time in history. The loss broke a winning streak of 22 races, including 18 finals, dating back to September 2018.

“I’m p****d because I lost my world title and of course I’m going to fight to get it back,” he said after his win at the Oslo Diamond League this June, when he stamped his return to top of the 400m hurdles with a world-leading 46.52s in front of his home crowd. It was the fourth-fastest performance in history and the second-fastest time of his career (behind his world record). 

The Oslo Diamond League was his first time racing the 400m hurdles in nine months. After last year’s World Championships loss in July, Warholm bounced back at the European Championships in Munich the very next month, retaining his title with a championship record of 47.12 seconds. After another victory at ISTAF Berlin, he closed his season so he could rest, recover and begin to build for the World Championships, scheduled in Budapest next month.

Building pace by running flat

Warholm began his 2023 season indoors over the 400m flat. Competing in the one-lapper gives him the baseline speed that serves him well in the 400m hurdles — and this was evident in how he attacked the start of the race at Oslo. “I’m very confident with my opening as long as my fitness level is where I want it to be, which it is right now… probably even better than I thought as well,” he said after setting the season’s leading time.

Starting fast is central to Warholm’s approach to the 400m hurdles. “Without trying to be cocky, I think we have changed the way everyone runs the 400m hurdles,” he said. “A lot of people start faster now than they did, even in the women’s 400m hurdles. I think before everyone was talking about this rhythm and you have to find it by starting slow and finishing the race fast. But you have to open tough because you can’t go out there and pick up those tenths [of a second] in the end.”

Warholm forced people to view the 400m hurdles differently with a jaw-dropping performance under the fierce mid-day sun at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium in 2021, becoming the first man in history to break the 46-second barrier. His 45.94 significantly improved his own world mark of 46.70 set earlier that year when he bettered Kevin Young’s 29-year-old world record. 

Warholm’s aggression, success and swagger have made him one of the sport’s biggest stars — when he announced his arrival on the global stage by winning his first world title as a baby-faced 21-year-old in 2017, his incredulous reaction, with his fingers around his mouth, mimicking the famous painting ‘The Scream’ by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, went viral. 

Fuelled by desire

A third world title, another world record and gold at next year’s Paris Olympics will make him not just one of the most decorated athletes in history, but it will also place him in the greatest-ever conversation. Warholm believes it’s his all-encompassing desire to win that has propelled him to these stratospheric heights. It has also shaped his hard-charging, “violent” style.

“There are a lot of athletes around the world that have bigger natural potential than myself,” he told Athletics Weekly. “I think it’s easy when you see a very gifted, talented runner who has all these things naturally, but me? It’s something I have created over the years with training. It’s always been me running because I really want to win.

“I really want to achieve and it’s all this willpower going into my stride. Yes, I think it’s violent. It’s not something that I do on purpose but that’s the way I get out my speed and I think, from the first step, for me it’s a battle to win. When the gun goes, there are no jokes for me anymore.”

Warholm is deadly serious about making amends for losing his world title to Dos Santos — it’s something of a revenge quest — and the two are set to meet in the Monaco Diamond League on July 21 in a preview to the Worlds in August. The 27-year-old Norwegian believes he is on track: after clocking 46.52s in his 2023 opener in Oslo, he said, “Today shows in the right circumstances, I can really attack the world record, maybe even this year.” 

Against Dos Santos, who went unbeaten last year and is the third-fastest 400m hurdler in history, and Rai Benjamin, the second-fastest 400m hurdler in history, Warholm will have to be at his very best. It’s a challenge he relishes. As he once said, “If you want to be top dog you’ve got to perform and then learn how to live with being the favourite.”