Despite great successes in her youth, Lea Meyer is about to end her career. With Henning von Papen, the track and field athlete finds the fun in competitive sports again. At the European Championships in Munich, Meyer runs to the silver medal – and then thanks her coach, who died in the spring.
In the biggest moment of her career so far, Lea Meyer thinks of someone who would definitely like to have been there, but can no longer be there. “I thought before the race today, Henning, the race is for you,” says the 24-year-old after her impressive final run in Munich, which sensationally made her Vice-European Champion over 3000 meters steeplechase. Henning, this is Henning von Papen, one of the most influential coaches in German athletics, who died at the end of January at the age of 69 after a serious illness.
“He just woke up the fun in me again,” says Meyer afterwards, in the TV interview before she needs a moment to breathe deeply when thinking about her former coach, so as not to be overwhelmed by tears. “You laid the foundation for me being here today at all.” The basis for this run to the silver medal, in which she improved her personal best by a little more than 10 seconds to 9:15.35 minutes. The numerous setbacks that Meyer has had to experience, process and overcome in recent years make this achievement all the more remarkable.
She suffers the most high-profile setback in Eugene, ahead of the World Championships in July. She falls at the moat, but not in any way. “You do that once in a lifetime,” she says now, in the catacombs of the 1972 Olympic Stadium, with a smile about the moment she dives forward and headlong into the moat. “Today I showed that I can do it all without doing any great stunts.” The pictures of her fall had become a symbol of the weak German performance at the World Cup, and now she seems to be able to laugh about it.
Certainly also because she has long been used to overcoming resistance. “The most important step” to cope with the painful water landing, she “made in Eugene, where I just got up” to continue running. Also over the moat, “simply so that no trauma occurs in the head”. In this resilience she sees her “great strength, that I really had to suffer some big setbacks, but I was always able to come back.” Actually, the 24-year-old seems to have decided not so long ago to stop competitive sport after great successes in the junior classes.
“I just didn’t feel like it anymore after my youth,” she gives an insight into her career, which begins promisingly in Lower Saxony at her home club VfL Löningen and its trainer Armin Beyer. As a 15-year-old she was already German U18 champion, and as a 16-year-old she won a medal at a U20 European Championship. Then came the big change, moving to a sports boarding school in Hanover, combined with “great hopes”, as she once said in retrospect. But there she loses her interest in sports, and “in the end even my Abitur was in danger.” At that time, Meyer had reached the end of her strength, both physically and mentally.
“Fortunately, my parents pushed me to come back,” she said in 2019, after years of stagnation, when she was able to qualify for a major international event, the U23 European Championship, for the first time. It is also the year that she goes to Cologne, to Henning von Papen’s training group. “I went to Henning at the time,” she says after her triumph in Munich, “and said: ‘Henning, I feel like running again, I’ll come back to training.’
Before that, the end of what was actually a very promising career was very close: “I gave up my running shoes completely for three or four months,” says Meyer, who is studying primary school teaching in Cologne alongside competitive sports. Von Papen, however, manages to convince the great talent to start over. “He reawakened the fun in me” and together with the training group “showed her again what the beauty of sport is”.
Under the guidance of Papens, she runs best times again, qualified for the Olympic Games in Tokyo last year, and entered the big stage of athletics for the first time, albeit in front of empty ranks. “Now I have the great privilege,” she says in Munich, of enjoying the benefits of sport, seeing the world and competing against top athletes. And just like in Munich, “to run on such a stage in front of such an audience”.
After Eugene’s setback, it has long been questionable whether Meyer can even take part in the home European Championship. On the way to the preparatory training camp in St. Moritz, she gets infected with the corona virus and can only train for one of the three weeks in Switzerland. That’s why she initially only sets herself the goal of making it into the final, which she easily achieves by winning the preliminary heat on Thursday.
“The fact that it has now become silver,” she says in the mixed zone of the Olympic Stadium, “that wasn’t even close to my focus.” She trained very well before the World Cup and was confident that her form could return after the corona infection. Realistically, however, she saw herself somewhere between third and twelfth place. In the last final of the penultimate day of the European Championships, however, she bravely tackled the race and kept up the pace set by the new European champion Luiza Gega from Albania and the Brit Elizabeth Bird, who ended up third.
At times she is surprised herself at how well her legs carry her. “In between I looked at the clock and noticed: ‘Hey, that’s pretty fast right now'”. However, she had previously wished for a quick final and then accepted it, and she finally developed the ability to keep up with consistent training. “You’re not there for luck, but for a reason.”
Meter by meter she catches up in the final phase after Gega and Bird run a bit ahead in the meantime. When it came to the last kilometer, says Meyer, she thought: “Lea, this is your race right now.” A race that for Meyer means the preliminary highlight of an eventful path – and after which she thanks her mentor Henning von Papen, whom she would have loved to have had by her side on this big day and whose absence brings tears to her eyes.
