Karsten Warholm’s restoration project – Athletics Weekly

Norwegian 400m hurdler and coach Leif Olav Alnes talk to Cathal Dennehy about the art of overcoming serious injury and pushing the limits of possibility

We didn’t talk about this before the Olympics – or indeed at the Olympics. As the world’s media pressed Karsten Warholm in Paris for the reason why he’d been convincingly beaten by his great rival, Rai Benjamin, the Norwegian chose not to go there.

He didn’t lie, but he did omit some key context – not wanting to be the athlete who raises the shield of excuses after coming up short. But the reality? Warholm struggled through last year with a chronic hamstring tendon issue, one that limited both the quantity and quality of his training.

“Those two work hand in hand,” he says now. “The volume comes first and then comes the quality. You can’t do all the training you want and, mostly, you can’t do it at the pace you want. I could run with it, but it was not ideal.”

Warholm kept the issue quiet all season, only telling the Norwegian media in the autumn. While it almost certainly hampered his performance in Paris, where he ran 47.06 to finish second to Benjamin’s 46.46, you won’t find him pointing to it as the reason he didn’t win.

And Warholm’s coach, Leif Olav Alnes, is just the same. “Complaining and making excuses after losing doesn’t help, it doesn’t change the result,” says Alnes. “And you should remember that, on your winning day, your opponent could post a lot of excuses. It doesn’t matter. You have to live with it. You win or you learn.”

Warholm, sitting alongside him, nods in agreement.

It’s 10 years since the pair began working together, and while there have been plenty of lows amid the many highs, 2024 proved a challenging year for both due to the tendon issue. “When you have to reduce the pace, you have to reduce the amount [of training] and you have to increase the time between the times you stress it,” says Alnes. “So, it’s actually biting you everywhere.”

Still, they did all they could, with Warholm going to Paris as the (slight) favourite after clocking 46.73 to win in Monaco a few weeks before. Given the issue he’d been dealing with all year, his silver medal could be seen by many as a triumph. But Warholm is too competitive, and too accomplished, to see it that way.

“I feel like I lost that race,” he says. “I still thought, on the day, that I could do it. It wasn’t a good race for me at all. Of…