Athletes Retirements Thread

[heywoodu 16,465]

7 hours ago, NearPup said:

van der Poel really just showed up, broke two world records and won two Olympic gold medals to make a point, then just dropped the mic and peaced out. Legend.

 

 

“When you’re a professional athlete in a sport that sucks as much as speed skating sucks, you’ve got to find a way to make it suck a little less,” van der Poel said at the Olympics. “I did 20 ultras, 1,000 skydives, I served in the army for a year, I do a lot of parties. I went snowboarding a lot. I went ski mountaineering. I biked the whole of Sweden. I made it adventurous, because I knew there was a time when I would lock myself up, enduring it. I had to build up a mountain of motivation.”

 

TBH I wouldn't be shocked if he showed up again in like November of 2025 in monstrously good form.

Or all of a sudden we see pictures of him in the Marathon des Sables  

[Swewi 509]

Therese Johaug ends her career after this season

[heywoodu 16,465]

I think I had missed some, but today alone I heard the following:

 

Biathlon

 Benjamin Weger

Erik Lesser

 

Nordic combined

 Eric Frenzel

 Johannes Rydzek

 

And Kjetil Jansrud had his last alpine skiing World Cup today.

[rybak 3,431]

 Dario Colonga (cross-country skiing) and  Viktor Polasek (ski jumping) ended their careers.

[Monzanator 5,126]

Daiki Ito (ski jumping) will retire at the end of the season.

[Makedonas 2,263]

 Maria Belibasaki (athletics) apparently has been quietly retired for a few months (no official announcement but I heard about it from a reliable source). She represented Greece in London 2012 (100m and 200m) and Rio 2016 (200m). She competed at three World Championships (2013, 2015, 2017) and three European Championships (2014, 2016, 2018).

 

2018 was definitely the highlight of her career, where she switched to 400m and won silver at the European Championships in Berlin, while her home country was burning from the wildfires. She also broke the Greek NR (50.45) in Berlin, and led the race for about 390m or so until she got tired at the end and Swiety-Ersetic edged her out for the gold (that's the race where Justyna set the current Polish record of 50.41). She also competed at the World Indoors that year and made the final, but it was later announced that she was DQed for lane infringement. Prior to 2018, she always skipped the indoor season.

 

Unfortunately she struggled a lot with injuries after 2018. It looked like she would be a big force and keep improving in 400m, and winning more medals, but she only ran in three meets in 2019 and one in 2021. I was really curious to see how high she could go and how she would compete against non-Europeans. Back then we were thinking maybe she could make an Olympic final in the 400m...

 

She is still only 30 years old so I was hoping to see her in Paris 2024 (she posted something last year about missing Tokyo because of injuries but that she wouldn't give up, but I guess she changed her mind). It's quite sad because 2018 seemed to be the beginning of the best years of her career, but instead it was the end of her career.

 

 

[Monzanator 5,126]

@Makedonas Polish 400m NR is still Irena Szewinska's old WR from Montreal OG

 

I hope Belibasaki still has fond memories from that EC, that was a truly unexpected medal for Greece

[Makedonas 2,263]

@Monzanator Sorry, for some reason I thought she had both but now I double checked and saw that she only has the indoor NR for Poland 

 

And I'm sure Belibasaki does have fond memories. She often posts about it on Instagram. It's too bad that she only really had one season as a 400m runner, but it's better than nothing. I remember watching her race with my uncle who died a few months later...

 

It was a really important Championships for Greece at a time when our country was destroyed by fires. We won 6 medals in Berlin (three of them gold), which was by far the most we had won in many many years. And the Greek 1-2 in the women's pole vault was also very special and memorable 

 

However I think the biggest surprise was Tsiamis bronze in the men's triple jump, after many years of disappointments he finally won his first medal when we least expected it, at age 36! (He is retiring later this year so I'll post about him when the time comes )

[heywoodu 16,465]

On 3/7/2022 at 3:45 PM, Monzanator said:

Daiki Ito (ski jumping) will retire at the end of the season.

But he's still so young  

 

My main memory of Ito: being in 2nd place in a Sapporo World Cup where I had quite some significant bets on him to finish on the podium at odds of 10+ and for him to win at 50+, which was going excellent....and then...

 

Spoiler

 

 

[heywoodu 16,465]

Ireen Wüst has just skated her last race and is now a former speed skater. What a career