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Deborah Schöneborn
Deborah Schöneborn
The year got off to an unfortunate start for Deborah Schöneborn: She narrowly missed her big goal of qualifying for the Olympic Games for the second time. The 29-year-old Berliner was 23 seconds off the pace at the Houston Marathon in January to take third place in the race for Olympic tickets. But at least "Debbie" Schöneborn was able to console herself with a strong fourth place in Houston and a personal best time of 2:24:54.
While still in Houston, Deborah Schöneborn set herself new goals for the year: her focus is now on qualifying for the half marathon at the European Championships in Rome in June, after which she wants to compete in the 50th BMW BERLIN-MARATHON at the end of September. To be able to start at the European Championships, she would have to beat the half marathon standard time of 70:30 minutes if possible. The fast course of the GENERALI BERLIN HALF MARATHON offers her a good opportunity to achieve this time. She ran her best time of 69:41 in Seville just over a year ago and knows the GENERALI BERLIN HALF MARATHON better than almost any other race: she finished seventh here in 2019, followed by 15th (2022) and 13th (2023).
Together with her twin sister Rabea Schöneborn, who will also be running the GENERALI BERLIN HALF MARATHON, "Debbie" Schöneborn has enjoyed a strong development.
Both were part of the German team that surprisingly won the bronze medal at the 2020 World Half Marathon Championships in Gdynia (Poland) and both ran very good races at the European Championships in Munich 2022. "Debbie" Schöneborn finished tenth and Rabea followed in twelfth place.They won the European Marathon Cup, which was integrated into the European Championships, with the German team.The year before, "Debbie" Schöneborn had already proved herself to be a strong championship runner in a heat race: At the Olympic Games, she achieved a surprising 18th place after narrowly beating her sister by just eight seconds in the battle for the third German starting place in qualifying.
The runners' older sister, Lena Schöneborn, is the 2008 Olympic champion in the modern pentathlon in Beijing. Deborah and Rabea Schöneborn also initially competed in the modern pentathlon. They have been focussing on running since 2017.