Germany never had a man break the hallowed 10-second mark in the 100 meters until Owen Ansah. After a historic season, he is trying to make his mark at the Paris Olympics.
Owen Ansah hopes to make the 100 meters final of the Paris OlympicsImage: Gladys Chai von der Laage/picture alliance
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Owen Ansah refused to accept what he had achieved until he saw it written down in black and white.
With the scoreboard showing a time of 9.99 seconds, he had just become the first German athlete to break the 10-second barrier in the 100 meters.
Setting that new national record booked Ansah's spot here at the Paris Olympics and was his reward for a challenging year that ultimately saw him break through.
"It doesn't get given to you. You have to train for it," Ansah told reporters after his record run at Germany's athletics championships in June. "You have to train hard day after day. You have to set your sights on what you want to do."
The achievement put Ansah in the same league as the legendary German sprinter Armin Harry, who won 100-meter gold at the Rome Olympics in 1960.
Harry's best mark of 10 seconds dead, which at the time was also a world record, stood as the German record for more than six decades but came in an era when times were measured manually with a stopwatch.
Owen Ansah is the only German to break the 10 second barrierImage: Stefan Mayer/Eibner-Pressefoto/picture alliance
Unfortunately, Ansah hasn't carried his success over to Paris just yet. He finished fifth in the heats, running 10.22 seconds in a stacked field that included reigning world champion Noah Lyles.
He's not out of the Olympics just yet, as he's among Germany's sprint pool for the 4x100-meter relay. But regardless of the results, his place among Germany's best sprinters ever is already secured.
"I don't want to put any pressure on myself," Ansah told DW in a recent interview. "I'm taking a relaxed approach and seeing what happens in the end."
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'My father is my biggest role model'
Ansah, who is from Hamburg, credits much of his success to his Ghanaian father. While some athletes would name other successful sprinters as their inspiration, the 23-year-old looks closer to home.
"My dad did athletics as a child," Ansah said. "He came to Germany back then without having anything. He worked hard to build up everything and brought three amazing children into the world. He's my biggest role model."
Hard work has been one of the major themes of Ansah's year. He missed much of the early part of the season with an injury to his pubic bone. Recovering from that has involved a lot of rehab and learning to be patient. "We had to put everything on ice and wait for it to go away," Ansah said.
There have been other sacrifices, too. Ansah moved away from Hamburg together with his coach, Sebastian Bayer, to train in Mannheim in the south of Germany. With family such an important part of Ansah's life, Bayer's role has extended to beyond that of a coach.
Owen Ansah has had to overcome injury to reach the OlympicsImage: Stefan Mayer/Eibner-Pressefoto/picture alliance
"It was a huge step for me at the beginning," Ansah said. "My coach came with me and I had a second father. It was clear that I would have had to take this step sooner or later anyway. You need to distance yourself from your habits and get out of your comfort zone. I know now that this step was definitely worth it."
The pair have been able to swap notes about the things they have in common.
"Through all my injuries I had different and better contact with him and that definitely gave me strength," Ansah said. "As an athlete he wasn't always injury-free and he always came back stronger. I always had that in the back of my mind."
Ansah's height poses a challenge
Part of Ansah's breakthrough has been down to understanding his developing body and what it requires, a sign of his growing maturity.
The most successful summer Olympians
Winning Olympic gold is a dream for many athletes. Some manage it more than once, but for this elite group, it became a habit. Here are the most successful medal winners at the Summer Olympics.
Image: Reuters/D. Ebenbichler
Usain Bolt: 8 gold medals
Gold or bust – that seems to have been the Jamaican sprinter's Olympic motto. Bolt won eight Olympic medals in his career, and they were all gold. He won the 100m and 200m double in Beijing 2012 and 4x100m relay gold completed a hat trick in London 2012 and and Rio de Janeiro 2016.
Image: picture-alliance/Zumapress/Li Ming
Ray Ewry – 8 gold medals
Just like Bolt, Ewry's Olympic record demonstrates that he wasn't prepared to settle for second best. Despite suffering from polio as a child and being confined to a wheelchair at times, the American won the standing long jump and standing high jump competitions three times in a row between 1900 and 1908. He also collected two golds in the standing triple jump.
Image: imago images//United Archives
Matt Biondi – 8 gold medals, 2 silvers and 1 bronze
The US swimmer won five of his eight Olympic gold medals at the 1988 Games in Seoul. He won the 50m and 100m freestyle before going on to win three more with the American relay team. That came after another relay success in 1984 before he added two more team golds in 1992 in Barcelona.
Jenny Thompson was a phenomenon: she won Olympic gold eight times between 1992 and 2000, making her one of the most successful athletes in Olympic history. Unusually though, she never won as an individual athlete, only as part of a relay team. She won silver in the 100m freestyle in 1992 and bronze in 2000.
Image: Imago Images
Sawao Kato – 8 gold medals, 3 silvers, 1 bronze
The Japanese gymnast is one of only four athletes who managed to win sucessive Olympic gold medals in the all-around discipline. Kato competed three times at the Olympics between 1968 and 1976 and won a total of 12 medals, eight of them gold. After his time as an active gymnast, he taught as a professor of health and sports sciences at the University of Tsukuba.
Image: picture-alliance/S. Simon
Birgit Fischer – 8 gold medals, 4 silvers
Germany's most successful athlete, the canoeist won a total of eight Olympic gold medals and four silver medals for East Germany, and then Germany. Fischer took part in six Olympic Games between 1980 and 2004 but was unable to compete in 1984 after the Eastern Bloc boycotted the Los Angeles Games. She is both the oldest and the youngest person to win gold in the canoe.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Simon
Carl Lewis – 9 gold medals, 1 silver
The American dominated the long jump and sprint in the 1980s and 90s. In 1999, he was honored as track-and-field athlete of the century by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). However, in 2003, he admitted having taken banned substances before qualifying for the 1988 Olympics but was acquited by the US federation.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Rauchensteiner
Mark Spitz – 9 x gold medals, 1 silver, 1 bronze
Mark Spitz would almost make this list based on the 1972 Olympics alone, winning a record seven golds in Munich. Four years earlier in Mexico City, he had won two relay gold medals, as well as silver and bronze. He then retired at 22 after the Munich Games before making a late comeback attempt, at the age of 41, in 1992. But Spitz failed to qualify for Barcelona.
Image: Getty Images/Allsport/T. Duffy
Paavo Nurmi – 9 gold medals, 3 silvers
The Finnish track and field athlete won 12 Olympic medals between 1920 and 1928 and stood atop the podium nine times. Nurmi set 24 world records at a number of different distances. In 1931, he endorsed the drug Rejuven, which is now considered an illegal anabolic steroid. A year later, the Finn was banned for life for violating his amateur status.
She actually dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer, but when her ballet teacher moved away, Larysa Latynina switched to artistic gymnastics at the age of 11. She promptly became the most successful athlete in her new sport. She stood on the podium at the Olympic Games 18 times, and on top of it nine times, between 1956 and 1964. After she retired, she worked as a coach.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Michael Phelps – 23 gold medals, 3 silvers, 2 bronzes
The most successful Olympian of all time, by almost any measure. Phelps has the most gold medals, the most individual golds (16) and the joint-most medals of any color at a single Games (eight, of which six were gold, at Beijing in 2008). He initially called it quits after the London 2012 Games, but then launched a comeback that brought him five more golds and one silver medal in Rio in 2016.
Image: Getty Images/T. Pennington
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"I'm already paying much more attention to my diet, my sleep, and my training, and I'm recovering much better now than I did in 2022," Ansah said. "I'm a little older, you just look at it completely differently."
However, one thing Ansah cannot control is his height. At 1.90 meters, he is relatively tall for a sprinter, a trait he shares with the fastest man ever, Usain Bolt. And that comes with its own set of challenges.
"As you can often see, we don't come out of the starting blocks perfectly," Ansah said. "You have to get your long legs working somehow."
Height, of course, didn't ever stop Bolt from succeeding. And while the Jamaican won't usurp Ansah's father as his role model, he is surely someone else the German sprinter can take inspiration from.
This piece was originally published on August 2 and updated on August 3 to include the results of the men's 100-meter preliminary heats.
