Kaja Debevec

Happy birthday to Slovenia’s sprinter Kaja Debevec, an eight-time national champion who set a Slovenian record at fourteen that nobody has touched since.

On 1 June 2011, running for her primary school in Postojna at a meet in Maribor, Kaja ran 7.72 over 60m. Fifteen years later it is still the Slovenian primary-school record, still printed on the federation’s records page, still standing. Whole generations of Slovenian schoolgirls have run at that meet since and the number has not moved.

The senior career backed it up. Kaja’s 7.50 over 60m and 11.72 over 100m are among the quicker marks a Slovenian woman has run, and in 2022 she took a national treble at Velenje, winning the 100m, the 200m and the 4x100m in the same championship. She has eight national titles in total, a mixed 4x100m national title with AAD Slovan, and a 4x100m win for Slovenia at the European Team Championships Second League in Kaunas.

What she is doing now is arguably the better story. Kaja is one of the coaches on the tek.si student athletics programme, running sessions twice a week alongside Tristan Korent, who was on that mixed relay with her. Sprinters who go into coaching tend to be the ones who understood the technical side rather than just executed it, and the athletes she is teaching are getting a decade and a half of it from somebody who was Slovenian schools champion before most of them were born.

Vse najboljše za rojstni dan, Kaja! Veliko zdravja, sreče in vsega lepega v letu, ki prihaja. Živeli! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇸🇮