German runner Smilla Kolbe condemns racist abuse of teammates at European Athletics Championships
German 800m runner Smilla Kolbe used a post-race television interview at the 2026 European Athletics Championships to condemn racist abuse directed at her teammates on social media, telling German TV: "I don't want to imagine what it would be like if I wasn't as white as I am." The Guardian
Kolbe, 24, had just finished sixth in her 800m semi-final in Birmingham, a race won by Britain's Keely Hodgkinson. Instead of walking away from the camera, she extended the interview to speak about what she had seen in the comment sections beneath her teammates' posts — harsh, racially abusive messages that she said had appeared repeatedly. "There is no place for racism in today's world," Kolbe said. She called on viewers to show the necessary respect and to celebrate the athletes' performances.
The abuse Kolbe described is not a new problem for German sport. The German Athletics Federation has a dedicated staff member working in Birmingham specifically to combat online hate speech, and is cooperating with the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office to identify, delete and prosecute abusive messages. At the 2024 Olympics, the German Olympic Sports Confederation used AI software to automatically remove nearly 4,000 threatening, racist, sexist or otherwise abusive messages and said it would take legal action against the perpetrators. The Guardian
The sport's global body has been working on the same front. At the end of 2024, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe presented findings from a study that examined 1.4 million messages sent to athletes, saying the governing body was equipping athletes with tools to proactively protect themselves against online abuse. Even Hodgkinson, Kolbe's semi-final rival and one of the most prominent names in the event, has deleted the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) around major championships, describing the app as "awful." The Guardian
Kolbe's own career has been on a steep upward curve. Running for Eintracht Frankfurt, she held an 800m personal best of 2:11.96 as a 19-year-old in 2022. By June 2026 she had broken 1:59.00 for the first time, running 1:58.99 — three hundredths of a second faster than her previous best. She had secured her European Championships qualifying standard with a 1:59.04 victory in Rome earlier in the summer. leichtathletik.de
What makes Kolbe's intervention land is that she chose to use her own moment — the seconds after a championship semi-final — to speak for teammates who could not see the abuse stop. A white athlete naming her own privilege in a sport where Black and brown athletes receive disproportionate targeting is not common, and Kolbe did it without hesitation. The comment sections will not clean themselves. The prosecutions in Frankfurt are a start. Kolbe's voice, trackside and direct, added another.
