Melissa Courtney-Bryant held her nerve – and her footing – amid one of the more disturbing scenes on an athletics track in recent memory to win a gutsy 3,000m European Indoor Championships silver medal.
Early in the race, the Briton heard a scream and knew that her close friend, the Dutch athlete Maureen Koster, had crashed to the ground. What she didn’t know was that she had also smashed her head and was unconscious.
As the athletes sped around the 200m track, officials rushed out to drag the unresponsive Koster off the track like a rag doll. No wonder the crowd went silent. And the mood was still subdued when the 32-year-old was eventually taken off the track in a stretcher.
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“I heard Maureen scream,” Courtney-Bryant said. ”I know her really well because we used to train together and room on the Diamond League. Then I saw a leg as I was running around, and I knew it was her shoe. It put everyone on edge, and everyone was pushing more.
“I was just trying to keep up, because you don’t want to end up down as well. It was carnage.”
The accident looked to have come after Koster clipped the British athlete Hannah Nuttall from behind. “I was in front of her, I heard something click behind me and just heard a scream,” Nuttall said. “Obviously it didn’t sound great.”
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The BBC missed the fall as it was showing the women’s high jump, but the incident was so serious that when they returned to the race, Steve Cram told viewers that it might have to be stopped as Koster was unconscious.
As she was taken to hospital, the race continued with Courtney-Bryant, Nuttall and another Briton, the 18-year-old Innes Fitzgerald, still in contention in the final stages.
Courtney-Bryant was the first to make her move. However Ireland’s Sarah Healy had enough in her tank to overtake her and come through in 8min 52.86sec, with Courtney-Bryant claiming silver, six hundredths of a second behind her.
“I really went for it down back straight,” said Courtney-Bryant, who came third in this event in 2019 and 2023. “I knew I had the speed. I came off the bend and still felt really confident going to the line. But before I knew it, my legs were just going underneath me, and she went past.
“I was like: ‘I’m gonna stack it, I’m gonna fall.’ But a silver medal is better than my two bronzes.”
Salomé Afonso of Portugal took bronze, with Nuttall sixth and Fitzgerald a creditable eighth on her senior debut.
Naturally, though, most of the discussion afterwards concerned Koster’s horror fall. Thankfully there was good news later in the evening as the official Team NL account on X posted that Koster was “conscious and responsive”.
There were two more silver medals for Britain on the final day of these championships in the Netherlands through George Mills in the men’s 3000m, and the women’s 4x400m team of Lina Nielsen, Hannah Kelly, Emily Newnham and Amber Anning.
Mills gave it everything in trying to beat Jakob Ingebrigtsen, but the brilliant Norwegian was simply too good as he powered away on the last lap to win his seventh European Indoor title at the age of 24 in 7:48.37
However the 25-year-old Mills, who was just over a second back, expressed himself “content” to win a medal in a strong field. “When he came round with about 400m to go, we put the hammer down,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘sit for as long as you can, and if you get to that last straight, you kick hard’. I just wasn’t able to hold on enough.”
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Meanwhile the British 4x400m women were still in contention on the final lap, with Anning – who had come fifth over 400m at the Olympics – against the Dutch 400m hurdles superstar Femke Bol. Bol, however, powered clear to claim gold in a European Indoor record of 3:24.34, with Britain setting a national record of 3:24.89 behind them.
There was then controversy as the Dutch team were disqualified for what looked like obstruction during the takeover on the final leg. Yet with the Dutch King, Willem-Alexander, in the stadium, the gold medal was then controversially reinstated after a long delay.
It certainly left the large crowd happy – although the British team, who ended these championships in eighth in the table with seven medals, looked to have been harshly treated.
