Nottwil Grand Prix: Five of the Best
Records have tumbled at Swiss track over the years 23 May 2018Nottwil in Switzerland plays host to the fifth of this year’s World Para Athletics Grand Prix, with competition underway on Friday 25 May.
It’s a venue that has seen plenty of amazing achievements in the past – in fact, more than 30 world records have fallen there over the last three years.
Here are five top moments from past Grand Prix:
1. Dutch sprinter Marlou van Rhijn has a habit of breaking records in Nottwil. The Paralympic and world champion set a new 400m T43 world record in 2014 and broke her own 100m T43 world record there in 2015 and 2016.
2. T51 sprinters Peter Genyn and Toni Piispanen have a terrific rivalry that is regularly played out on the Swiss track – in 2016 Genyn broke the 200m T51 record there, lowering it again in 2017, although it was Piispanen who took the win in the 100m 12 months ago.
3. In 2016, Kuwaiti Ahmad Almutairi broke the men’s 200m T33 world record twice – first in the heats then in the final. He had set the previous world record 12 months prior at the 2015 Grand Prix and went on to break it again in 2017.
4. British racer Shelby Watson broke four world records over two days of competition in 2016. The Scot smashed records in the 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m T33.
5. 2017 was the year for the distance records, with Great Britain’s Hannah Cockroft (T34), Canadian Brent Lakatos (T53/54) and Tunisian Walid Ktila (T34) all smashing 1,500m world records in their respective classes, while Briton Ben Rowling broke the 5,000m T34 mark and South Africa’s Louzanne Coetzee lowered her own women's 5,000m T11 time by more than a minute.