Zuzia Kornacka

Happy monumental birthday to Poland’s Zuzanna Kornacka, who won two national championships in a single year out of a town of nine thousand people.

In February last year at Wrocław, Zuzia won the Polish U18 indoor 300m title in 39.84. Five months later at Poznań, at the Ogólnopolska Olimpiada Młodzieży, she won the Polish U18 **400m hurdles** championship in 60.57, setting a personal best in the final to do it. Her club’s report caught the moment properly: she wins the final, becomes Polish champion, and sets a very valuable lifetime best along the way. She has a national silver from the U16 300m hurdles to go with the two golds.

Then in July she went to Skopje for the **European Youth Olympic Festival**, in the Polish vest, and raced both the 400m hurdles and the mixed 4x400m relay.

The 400m hurdles is the hardest event on the track to learn young. The stride pattern has to be drilled until it survives the point where the legs stop obeying, and the last two barriers arrive when there is nothing left to give them. Very few seventeen-year-olds anywhere run it under 61 seconds. She does it out of KS LZS Kruszwica, a club in a town of about nine thousand on the shore of Lake Gopło, coached by Małgorzata and Andrzej Luzak, a husband-and-wife pair who have been at it there for years. When she won at Poznań, the municipality itself put out the congratulations.

Two national titles, an international vest, and a coaching couple in a small town who got her there.

Wszystkiego najlepszego, Zuziu! Sto lat, dużo zdrowia i jeszcze wiele szybkich płotków przed Tobą! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇵🇱