If she will not be physically present in the Antwerp region, the athlete trained by Michael Van der Plaetsen should, logically, win a tenth Gold Spike crowning the best Belgian female athlete of the year.
And succeed Cynthia Bolingo on the charts, the only one who managed to interrupt her impressive series of nine consecutive successes.
Golden Spike 2023: and the big winner is… Carole Bam!
The new gold medal won by Nafi Thiam at the Paris Olympic Games as well as the title of European champion which she won in Rome in June leave little room for suspense. Noor Vidts, very deserving and also an Olympic medalist last summer, will have to settle for the silver Spike.
Among the men, the votes will certainly be closer to decide between Bashir Abdi, who won the silver medal in the Olympic marathon, and Alexander Doom, author of an exceptional season punctuated by a world indoor champion title, a outdoor European title and a new Belgian record in the 400m. Unfortunately for him, the Flandrien had bad luck during the Games where he was unable to express his full potential.
This is why Nafi Thiam left South Africa for Mexico
Internationally, Nafi Thiam is the only Belgian athlete to be able to claim the title of Athlete of the Year during the gala evening organized by World Athletics. The 2017 winner is, alongside Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Julien Alfred, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, Sifan Hassan and Ruth Chepngetich, among the six athletes vying for the supreme women's title.
Furthermore, in the “field” category (competition), one of the three constituted for this election (with “track” and “outside the stadium”), our representative is one of the two finalists.
She enters into competition with the Ukrainian Mahuchikh, the high jumper who broke the world record in the discipline this summer with 2.10 m in addition to being crowned Olympic and European champion. Fingers crossed!
