Viktorie Kulhankova

Happy monumental birthday to Czechia’s sprinter Viktorie Kulhánková, who has taken seven tenths off her 100m in a single season.

Read that again. In 2025 her best over 100m was 12.46. This year she has run 11.76. Seven tenths of a second is not an improvement in sprinting, it is a different athlete. And it is not one lucky afternoon either: every personal best she owns over the sprints and hurdles was set in 2026. She ran 24.83 over 200m at Třebíč in May, 14.05 over the 100m hurdles at Praha-Eden in May, and 7.69 and 8.98 indoors at Ostrava in February.

It brought her the first national medal of her career. At the Czech U20 Championships in Olomouc in June she took bronze over 100m in 11.80, and made the 200m final too. A fortnight earlier she had been at the Zlatá tretra in Ostrava, the Golden Spike, in its 65th year, in a Czech U20 vest, running a leg of a 4x100m that finished third in 44.69 against Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Cyprus and Hungary. That is her country’s biggest meeting, live on national television, and she was on the track at it. In June she also took a regional triple at Třebíč: 100m, 200m and 100m hurdles, all three in one weekend.

There is a reason the sprint numbers arrived all at once. Viktorie came up as a combined-events athlete and scored 4,560 points in the heptathlon at Stará Boleslav in 2024. Multi-eventers who specialise late tend to arrive with a broader base than the sprinters they line up against, and then everything moves at the same time.

She has been at TJ Spartak Třebíč, a club whose athletics section goes back to 1919, coached by Ondřej Tomek. Her club’s own Velká cena Třebíče is on 16 August, two days after her birthday.

Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám, Viktorie! Hodně štěstí, zdraví, lásky a ještě spoustu rychlých setin. Na zdraví! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇨🇿