Ziva Remic

Happy birthday to Slovenia’s world champion 800m runner Živa Remic, who two weeks ago became the first Slovenian woman ever to win a world junior title.

On 8 August at Hayward Field in Eugene, Živa won the World U20 800m final in 2:03.03, going to the front early, holding the lead at the bell, and kicking wide off the final turn to hold off Greece’s Ioulianna Roussou by five hundredths of a second. The top three finished inside half a second of each other. She had won her heat and then the fastest semi-final of the round to get there. The next day she ran a leg of Slovenia’s 4x400m, which finished fourth in a national U20 record of 3:32.26.

She is sixteen years old, and she was beating a field made up largely of athletes two years older. What makes it more remarkable is that she is still young enough to be eligible for the next World U20 Championships in 2028. Her season had already produced gold at the European U18 Championships in Rieti in June, where she set a championship record in her semi-final and then broke it again in the final. And in Germany that same month she ran 1:59.64, breaking two minutes for the first time, setting Slovenian U18, U20 and U23 records in a single race and becoming the second-fastest European U18 performer in history. In March she won the Slovenian senior indoor 800m title at sixteen, and last summer she took EYOF 400m gold and European U20 silver.

She runs for AK Olimpija in Ljubljana under coach Gregor Grad, comes from Grosuplje, and is a pupil at Gimnazija Bežigrad. Her coach’s verdict after Eugene was simply that all the hard work had paid off and everything went as planned. Two world-level golds before her seventeenth birthday, and no ceiling in sight.

Vse najboljše za rojstni dan, Živa! Želimo ti obilo zdravja, sreče in uspehov — in še veliko hitrih krogov. Živeli! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇸🇮