Iva Susac

Happy birthday to Croatia’s 400m hurdler Iva Šušac, who races the hardest event on the track and turns out for Croatian relay squads across four different formats.

Iva has run 1:01.37 in the 400m hurdles at Čakovec, and she is inside the world’s top eight hundred in the event. Alongside that she has run on Croatian 4x400m, 4x100m, indoor 4x400m and indoor 4x200m teams — four different relay disciplines, outdoor and indoor, each demanding a different changeover and a different way of running a leg. Very few athletes at any level get selected across that much of the range.

That breadth is the story here. Relay places are the one thing in athletics you cannot enter yourself for; somebody has to pick you. Being trusted in a 4x100m, where the handovers are flying and there is no margin at all, and also in a 4x400m, where you have to run a full lap and still find the composure to pass the stick cleanly, means two entirely different sets of coaches have arrived at the same view of her.

And the 400m hurdles deserves its reputation. A full lap with ten barriers, a stride pattern you have to hold while your legs are failing, and the near certainty that you will have to change your count somewhere in the last hundred metres. Athletes who choose it are choosing the option that punishes them most, and they tend to be the ones who get considerably better into their twenties, when the strength arrives to hold the pattern all the way home. The good years in this event are still ahead of her.

Sretan ti rođendan, Iva! Sve najbolje — puno zdravlja i još mnogo brzih krugova pred tobom. Sretno! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇭🇷