We speak to a Swiss athlete whose sprint hurdles win at last year’s World Championships has truly widened her horizons.
As the youngest of four sisters, Ditaji Kambundji has spent much of her life trying to catch up – a particularly difficult task in a family of top-class sprinters. She can’t remember precisely what age she was when she first raced but does recall that those contests came so early that “the age category didn’t exist yet, so I had to compete with the kids one year older than me”. However, rather than all of that chasing leaving her demoralised or disheartened, it had quite the opposite effect.
“It has really driven me,” says the 23-year-old. “I’ve grown up in the position of looking up to my sisters, so I wanted to start athletics really, really early. I was born into this. I think, two weeks after my birth, my mum was at a kids competition with me in her arms. I’ve known tracks my whole life and I’ve always had that [belief of]: ‘I can go further, I can run faster’.”
That belief has proved to be well-founded. After years of watching her older sibling Mujinga (33) scorching her way to world and European medals, as well as three Olympics, while Muswama (30) also pursued a sprinting career before switching from the starting blocks to the bobsleigh and was part of Switzerland’s squad at the Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Ditaji has been leading the way.
Last year, and especially at the World Championships in Tokyo, was when everything changed. Really changed. As her siblings focused on the 100m and 200m, it was through the combined events that Ditaji first developed her love for the hurdles “mixing speed and technique and everything”. European U20 and U23 titles arrived, as did senior medals and qualification for the Paris Olympics, but last spring, at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, came a first title when she broke the continental 60m hurdles record, taking gold in 7.67. A silver medal at the World Indoor Championships followed two weeks later and the platform was set beautifully for the summer ahead.
Outdoors, over the 100m hurdles, Kambundji’s pace was starting to quicken, too. She had a feeling that something special might be on the cards but the Swiss is also very much aware that running fast in training is one thing, but doing it in competition – right when it matters – is quite another.
“I had a season where I had a lot of stable runs around the 12.40s and 12.50s,” she says, “But I was able to break that big barrier in the moment when it really counted.”
Her previous best of 12.40 would become a thing of the past in Tokyo. Facing a field that included Olympic champion Massai Russell and world record-holder Tobi Amusan, Kambundji held her nerve and ran the race of her life, timing her dip to the line perfectly.
“I had that moment where I was like: ‘Okay, I know this was good, I might be in for a medal’,” she recalls. “But I didn’t want to [allow myself to think] ‘Did I win?’ and then not win. I needed to see it on the screen.”
After that moment of limbo, the results flashed up. Kambundji had indeed won, in a time of 12.24, just shy of Yordanka Donkova’s 27-year-old European record.
“The biggest thing that really made me proud is that I was able to prove to myself that: ‘Okay, I can do what I think I’m able to do’,” she says. “In my head all season, I’d been thinking about those fast times and knowing that it was possible, but I’d never run them. A lot of people can run fast in their head but I showed myself that I can run these fast times, and I proved it to myself in the right race.”
As the moment of victory started to sink in, up in the stands, the Kambundji family were cheering the achievement to the rafters. Ditaji remembers knew precisely how they were feeling.
“I know exactly what it feels like to be on the other side,” she says. “I spent my whole childhood in the stands, and I know what it’s like to cheer your family on, and how special it is for the people watching. It’s always something that really inspired me when I was in the stands, that one day I wanted to be there. I wanted to be the person competing.”
So often the source of that inspiration was Mujinga, the reigning world indoor 60m and European 200m champion who has been many things to Ditaji – sister, training partner, travel partner, room-mate. However, fulfilling another very different role took the older sister away from all of that until recently. She gave birth to her first child, Léon, in November and his auntie is smitten.
“It’s the best thing ever,” says Ditaji. “My oldest sister already had two kids, but the more kids the better. I love the role of being an auntie and I think it’s such a beautiful journey for [Mujinga] to be on. It makes so much sense seeing her in that role and it’s just beautiful to watch.”
The sisters have now been reunited at their training base and it was just recently announced that Mujinga had joined Ditaji in signing with On, a brand that also has its roots in Switzerland.
“I love training with her,” says Ditaji. “But then also travelling, competition, sharing a room – being able to do that with my sister has always impacted me in a positive way and meant I’m always comfortable where I am. It doesn’t matter where I go on the planet.
“Training with her has also had a big impact. When we run together, she’s always been faster than me and having her push me has been really, really helpful. I have really missed her these last couple of months, but I’m really excited now that she’s back.
“At a young age, I was able to see my sister and look at what she does. A lot of things that were set in place for her – her structure, the coaching – were also things that worked really, really well for me. I was able to find my perfect solution really quickly and at a young age.”
The next big assignment for Ditaji is the World Indoor Championships. A silver medallist last year, she has warmed up nicely for Toruń and has already won in the venue this winter, taking victory at the Copernicus Cup last month. Opposition will be fierce, particularly in the form of defending champion and world record-holder Devynne Charlton – a dominant force over the 60m hurdles who is going for her third consecutive title. However, Kambundji has spent a lot of time working on the mental side of her event and isn’t about to be intimidated.
“I have very, very strong competitors,” she says. “It’s always different to start next to her [Charlton]. She’s a very, very quick starter, and I have to bring my absolute best, but the most important thing at a competition has always been to focus on myself.
“In Tokyo, for example, I don’t know what happened next to me. I don’t think I really need that one-to-one battle. I can handle it when it’s there, but I think the best race will always be where I can totally run my own race.”
In an event where there is so little room for error, mental clarity becomes all the more important. There is an art to flipping the mind, says Kambundji, from focusing on everything that could go wrong to what might be possible instead.
“Simplifying my task for that day is really what gets my mind to focus and be calm about everything,” she says. The spinning thoughts don’t really help you so [it’s better to focus on] the simple thoughts like: ‘I have to hurdle. That’s something I’ve done 1000 times before and I’m going to do it 1000 times after this. I’m not doing something that I don’t know how to do’. That is what really helped me.
“I work a lot with breathing exercises. I needed to learn ‘what person am I when I go to the start line? Am I the person that needs to be really hyped with a lot of energy?’. I learned that that is absolutely not what works for me. I need to be calm, I need to be focused.”
She adds: “A good race is a race where I don’t remember much. In Tokyo, I remember the last few hurdles, but I have no memories of everything that happened from one to eight and that is a good thing. Of course, right before the race, there are a lot of thoughts. So that’s when I use my techniques and calm myself down, but during the race, when I have a good race, I don’t need the cues. I don’t think, I just do.”