Melissa Courtney-Bryant held her nerve – and her footing – amid one of the more disturbing scenes on an athletics track in recent memory to win a gutsy 3,000m European Indoor Championships silver medal.
Early in the race, the Briton heard a scream and knew that the Dutch athlete Maureen Koster, her close friend, had crashed to the ground. What she didn’t know was that Koster had also smashed her head and was unconscious.
As the athletes sped around the 200m track, officials rushed out to drag the unresponsive Koster off the track like a rag doll. No wonder the crowd went silent. And the mood was still subdued when the 32-year-old was eventually taken off the track on a stretcher.
“I heard Maureen scream,” Courtney-Bryant said. “I know her really well because we used to train together and room on the Diamond League. Then I saw a leg as I was running around, and I knew it was her shoe. It put everyone on edge, and everyone was pushing more. I was just trying to keep up, because you don’t want to end up down as well. It was carnage.”
The accident looked to have come after Koster clipped the British athlete Hannah Nuttall from behind. “I was in front of her, I heard something click behind me and just heard a scream,” Nuttall said. “Obviously it didn’t sound great.”
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The BBC missed the fall because it was showing the women’s high jump, but the incident was so serious that when it returned to the race, Steve Cram told viewers that it might have to be stopped because Koster was unconscious.
As she was taken to hospital, the race continued with Courtney-Bryant, Nuttall and another Briton, the 18-year-old Innes FitzGerald, still in contention in the final stages.
Courtney-Bryant was the first to make her move. However Ireland’s Sarah Healy had enough in her tank to overtake her and come through in 8min 52.86sec, with Courtney-Bryant claiming silver, six hundredths of a second behind.
“I really went for it down the back straight,” said Courtney-Bryant, who came third in this event in 2019 and 2023. “I knew I had the speed. I came off the bend and still felt really confident going to the line. But before I knew it, my legs were just going underneath me, and she went past. I was like: ‘I’m gonna stack it, I’m gonna fall.’ But a silver medal is better than my two bronzes.” Salomé Afonso of Portugal took bronze, with Nuttall sixth and FitzGerald a creditable eighth on her senior debut.
Naturally, most of the discussion after concerned Koster’s horror fall. Thankfully there was good news later in the evening as the official Team NL account on X posted that Koster was “conscious and responsive”.
There were two more silver medals for Britain on the final day of these championships in the Netherlands through George Mills in the men’s 3,000m and the women’s 4x400m team of Lina Nielsen, Hannah Kelly, Emily Newnham and Amber Anning.
Mills gave it everything in trying to beat Jakob Ingebrigtsen, but the brilliant Norwegian was simply too good as he powered away on the last lap to win his seventh European Indoor title at the age of 24 in 7:48.37.
The 25-year-old Mills, who was just over a second back, expressed himself “content” to win a medal in a strong field. “When he came round with about 400m to go, we put the hammer down,” he said. “I was thinking: ‘Sit for as long as you can, and if you get to that last straight, you kick hard.’ I just wasn’t able to hold on enough.”
Meanwhile the British 4x400m women were still in contention on the final lap, with Anning – who had come fifth over 400m at the Olympics – against the Dutch 400m hurdles superstar Femke Bol. However, Bol powered clear for gold in a European Indoor record of 3:24.34, with Britain setting a national record of 3:24.89.
There was then drama as the Dutch team were disqualified for obstruction in the takeover on the final leg. There was a 90-minute delay, an appeal and counter-appeal before it was decided the initial result should stand after it emerged that it was an error from a race official, who had put the teams in the wrong order for the changeover. It left the large Dutch crowd happy – and the British team, who ended these championships eighth in the table with seven medals, were not too disappointed.
