Photo: Ssu via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped. This adapted image is also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Jorinde van Klinken has become the first Dutch athlete ever to win a European discus title, taking gold at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham on Friday, August 14 with a throw of 67.67 meters.
She threw her best on the very first attempt and nobody could catch her. Four days earlier she won silver in the shot put with a personal best of 19.64m, so she leaves Birmingham with two medals, NL Times reports. Her teammate Alida van Daalen finished fourth, just 39 centimeters short of bronze.
Typically for a thrower, she was already thinking about the next few centimeters:
A very good distance. But if I had thrown 2.5 meters farther, I would have been standing here really beaming from ear to ear. I'm super happy with my title today. But it's sometimes my weakness that I'm more focused on the performance than on the medal.
"Ultimately it's now mainly a very nice feeling that I've taken two medals at consecutive European Championships," she added.
Van Klinken is reported to follow a vegan diet. Great Vegan Athletes calls her "the Dutch vegan", and her Wikipedia entry lists her as vegan, citing a 2025 Instagram post of her own.
Plant-based athletes have been collecting medals for years. Back in 2017 vegan athletes set world records and won a huge medal haul, and since then Kaylin Whitney has won Olympic relay gold and Eleanor Harvey won Canada's first ever Olympic fencing medal.
A first for the Netherlands, and a golden week in Birmingham.