Isalie Vandael

Happy birthday to Belgium’s Isalie Vandael, who ran a lifetime best three weeks ago and wore the national vest in Botswana in May.

On 18 July at the Nacht van de Atletiek in Heusden-Zolder, Isalie ran 53.61 over 400m, a personal best. In March she had run 53.85 indoors at the Belgian Indoor Championships in Louvain-la-Neuve, also a lifetime best, and in the same month she successfully defended her Belgian U23 400m title in 54.37, having taken the outdoor U23 title in Nijvel the previous September. Back-to-back national U23 champion, indoors and out.

In May she was in Gaborone with the Belgian Cheetahs at the World Athletics Relays, running a 4x400m leg in 52.46. Her club, AV Toekomst in Hasselt, had posted a congratulations the week the squad was announced. Getting into a Belgian 4x400m squad is genuinely hard, because Belgium is one of the strongest relay nations in Europe and the competition for those four places is fierce every single year. She got in at twenty-one.

She said in April that her target for this season was to go under fifty-three seconds. She is at 53.61 with a European Championships still on the calendar and her name in the frame for a Belgian relay place there. Her whole progression has been a series of small, relentless bites: 53.93, then 53.85, then 53.61. Nobody who moves like that stops at 53.61.

She combines it with a topsport programme at UHasselt, which is the arrangement Flanders uses to keep its best young athletes in education without asking them to choose.

Hartelijk proficiat met je verjaardag, Isalie! Nog vele jaren in goede gezondheid, en nog veel snelle rondes erbij. Amai! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇧🇪