Alina Drutman

Born: November 19, 2001  |  Birthplace: Ukraine  |  Nationality: Israeli  |  Club: Maccabi Rishon LeZion  |  Events: 100m, 200m, 60m  |  World Ranking: #359 (100m)  |  Instagram: @ppvch.a

Israel’s Fastest Woman

In June 2024, Alina Drutman crossed the finish line at the Israeli National Athletics Championships as the fastest woman in the country — becoming the Israeli champion in the 100 meters for the first time in her career. She had been building toward that moment for years, steady season after steady season, and when it finally arrived she ran 11.72 seconds to claim the gold that had eluded her earlier in her development. Then, for good measure, she came back the next day and won the 200 meters as well, completing a sprint double at the national championships that announced something important: Alina Drutman had moved into a new tier.

That was in 2024. By the summer of 2025, she had pushed her 100m personal best to 11.55 seconds and recorded a 200m lifetime best of 23.84 — the kind of progression that suggests her arrival at the top of Israeli women’s sprinting was not a one-season flash but the beginning of a sustained campaign. A four-time Israeli national champion with a World Athletics ranking inside the top 360 in the women’s 100m globally, she is now firmly established as the benchmark for Israeli women’s sprinting, and the standard she is setting seems likely to keep rising.

From Ukraine to Israel: A New Beginning

Alina Drutman was born on November 19, 2001, in Ukraine — a country that has produced many athletes who have made their names representing Israel after making aliyah and becoming Israeli citizens. She immigrated to Israel in 2018, at age 16, joining the Maccabi Rishon LeZion athletics club in Rishon LeZion, the city just south of Tel Aviv that has a long history as one of Israel’s most important sports communities.

Her introduction to athletics is a story that the Israeli Athletics Association has shared publicly with considerable affection. When she was 13 years old and coaches first identified that she had genuine athletic potential, they initially pointed her not toward sprinting but toward javelin throwing and high jump. The thinking at the time made sense from a talent-identification standpoint — her physical profile raised questions about which events would suit her best — but within a few years it became clear that her calling was on the straight track. Sprinting was where she belonged.

The transition from a young girl being directed toward throwing and jumping to a national sprint champion is one of the more quietly compelling threads in her story. It speaks to the patience required of developing athletes, the willingness of coaches to recalibrate, and the importance of finding the right event before the competitive window closes. In Drutman’s case, the recalibration happened at just the right time.

The Early Competitive Years: Establishing Herself (2020–2022)

Drutman’s early results in Israeli athletics show exactly the kind of gradual, consistent improvement that coaches look for in developing sprinters. At the 2020 Israeli Championships, she finished tenth in the 100 meters in 12.67 seconds and sixth in the 200 meters in 27.13 — performances that were entirely typical of a promising teenage newcomer, establishing a baseline but not yet signaling imminent national-level dominance. By the 2021 nationals, she had already made meaningful strides: a fourth-place finish in both the 100m (12.16) and the 200m (25.29) marked her as a genuine competitor at the senior national level, even if the top of the podium was still some distance away.

Also in 2021, she was part of the Israeli women’s 4x100m relay team that competed at the European Athletics U23 Championships in Tallinn, Estonia. That team — which also included Ilana Dorfman, Eden Finkelstein, and Nitzan Levi — did not advance past the opening round, but the experience of competing at a European championship-level event was a significant step in Drutman’s international development.

The 2022 season brought a significant benchmark. She competed at the Maccabiah Games — the international Jewish and Israeli multi-sport competition that serves as one of athletics’ most important platforms for Israeli athletes, held in Israel every four years — and won the gold medal in the 100 meters and the gold in the 200 meters, establishing herself as a double Maccabiah champion. That summer also saw her part of the Israeli 4x100m relay team at a European Athletics competition in Craiova, Romania, where the team ran 45.20 seconds — a time that stands to this day as a personal best (and Israeli relay record) for Drutman in the 4x100m relay. It remains her highest-scoring single performance on the World Athletics points table.

Her individual 100m times were also improving — moving through the 11.80s and approaching the 11.70s — and her 200m had similarly sharpened. The question in 2022 was not whether she would become one of Israel’s top sprinters, but when she would break through to the national title.

The Breakthrough Season: 2023–2024

The season Drutman has called the year when “everything exploded” was 2023–24 — using the Israeli athletics association’s system of naming seasons across the calendar year. Everything clicked simultaneously: she ran faster, she competed more consistently, she made the technical and physical strides she had been working toward across several previous campaigns. The cumulative investment paid off.

At the 2024 Israeli Athletics Championships held at the renovated Hadar Yosef Stadium, she won the women’s 100 meters in 11.72 seconds — her first national title in the event and the realization of years of work. “This is a moment I waited a long time for,” she said at the time. “Every year something didn’t come together, every year there was some small thing in the way. Last year everything connected from every possible direction, everything was right, everything exploded. It was a season I had waited for a lot.”

The next day, she won the 200 meters to complete the double. The sprint double at the Israeli national championships — joining a short list of women who have achieved it — was the defining statement of her breakout year.

Beyond the national championship, she was setting personal bests across the sprint distances throughout the season. Her 100m mark moved to 11.53 seconds (wind-aided), registered on May 15, 2024, and she was pushing her 200m times to levels well below 24 seconds. It was, by any measure, the season she had been pointing toward since immigrating to Israel six years earlier.

She also made a significant change heading into the next phase of her career: she began working with a foreign coach remotely — a system in which the coach would send weekly training plans and Drutman would send back video and feedback after each session. She was careful not to name the coach publicly during the early stages of the arrangement, noting that they had only recently started working together and she wanted to let the relationship develop before drawing attention to it. What she said was that she felt a strong professional connection, that the coach’s methodology seemed suited to her needs, and that every technical detail was being closely analyzed. “He reacts to every small detail and explains,” she said.

The Pivot and a Vegan Life

Drutman is also a publicly committed vegan — a dimension of her identity and athletic life that she has been open about. She adopted the vegan lifestyle at the age of 18, while still in her early competitive development. Two experiences prompted the change: adopting a dog from the streets, which made her think differently about animals in general, and encountering a YouTube video discussing veganism and its relationship to global warming.

At the time, her coach and training peers were skeptical. “In the beginning, no one really understood this matter,” she has said. “It was an issue for my coach and my athlete friends. Mostly because there wasn’t awareness.” As the years passed and her performances kept improving — culminating in national titles — those doubts receded. “Today my coach doesn’t bother me about it because he sees that I’m in great shape,” she noted. She has spoken about being an example for other athletes who might consider plant-based diets, and about the broader cultural shift she has observed in how veganism is received in Israel and in athletics. “So many people [are] aware and understand this philosophy. And of course all the amazing products that are made.”

The vegan element of Drutman’s story is not incidental to her athletic identity — it is something she actively connects to her athletic performance and her sense of self as an athlete. Whether managing nutrition during competition travel or during intensive training blocks, maintaining her commitment has required deliberate planning, and she presents it as a source of pride rather than inconvenience.

Personal Life and Partnership

Drutman’s partner is fellow Israeli athlete Ivan Andrienko, a sprinter and long jumper who has also competed at the Israeli national level. Their relationship is something she has spoken warmly about in interviews. Being with someone who is also a competitive track athlete means that the demands of training, competition, travel, and the psychological rhythms of a sport career are mutually understood in a way that can be difficult to achieve with a partner outside the sport. “He is the most understanding — someone who is not in athletics would not understand me,” she has said. There is a mutual support structure: on difficult days, they navigate it together; and the shared identity of two athletes in the same sport means the highs and lows of competition are processed from the inside rather than explained from the outside.

2025: Setting Career Bests and Looking Ahead

The 2025 season marked another step forward. On February 1, 2025, competing at the indoor championships, she ran the 60 meters in 7.52 seconds — tying a personal best in that event. She had expressed her ambition to compete in the European Indoor Athletics Championships ahead of the season, and the 60m was the event she identified as a focus for the winter campaign, even as she acknowledged it as a more challenging distance for her than the 100m outdoors.

Then, in the summer of 2025, she pushed her outdoor marks to new heights. On July 6, 2025, she ran 11.55 seconds in the 100 meters — surpassing her previous best of 11.53 (which had been wind-aided) with a legal time that now stands as the definitive mark of her career to date. On July 31, 2025, she won the 200 meters at the Israeli national championships in 23.84 seconds — a personal best and national title that cemented her position as the dominant force in Israeli women’s sprinting across both distances.

Her World Athletics ranking as of the 2025–26 season places her approximately #359 in the world in the women’s 100m — a ranking that reflects the genuinely competitive depth of global women’s sprinting, and one that she is clearly targeting for improvement. She has spoken repeatedly about focusing on times over placements, about setting personal bests in every event as her season-to-season goal, and about the belief that the results she has been producing represent a progression that can continue.

Her 60m indoor best of 7.48 seconds was set on February 21, 2026, at the Atletska dvorana in Belgrade, Serbia — a result that moved her further up the indoor rankings and reflected the kind of international competition exposure she has been seeking consistently. World Athletics records indicate season’s bests for 2026 are being accumulated.

Israel in Athletics: The Competitive Context

To understand where Alina Drutman fits in Israeli athletics requires a brief look at the context of the sport in her adopted country. Israel’s athletics program competes within the European Athletics framework — a somewhat unusual arrangement for a geographically Middle Eastern country, but one that has been in place since 1989 when the IAAF voted to make Israel a member of the European Athletics Association. This means Israeli athletes like Drutman compete at European championships, European team events, and European indoor championships rather than Asian equivalents, giving them exposure to the depth of European sprinting talent.

Israel has produced competitive athletes at the world level across multiple events — from Shai Moskowitz’s hammer throw appearances to the marathon excellence of Maru Teferi and Lonah Chemtai Salpeter, to the sprinting and hurdles tradition embodied by athletes like Ilana Dorfman who preceded Drutman at the top of Israeli women’s sprinting. Drutman’s emergence as Israel’s fastest woman over 100m represents a real development for the national program, given that women’s sprinting in Israel has historically been a smaller pipeline than distance events.

Her club, Maccabi Rishon LeZion, is one of the main athletics organizations in the country, with facilities in Rishon LeZion that support her training alongside a range of Israeli and internationally-born athletes who have made Israel their competitive home.

Personal Bests and Career Highlights

• 100 Metres: 11.55 (July 6, 2025)
• 200 Metres: 23.84 (July 31, 2025 — Israeli National Championships, also national title)
• 60 Metres (indoor): 7.48 (February 21, 2026 — Belgrade, Serbia)
• 4x100m Relay: 45.20 (June 18, 2022 — Craiova, Romania)
• 4x Israeli National Champion (100m and 200m double in 2024; 200m in 2025; earlier titles)
• 2022 Maccabiah Games double champion (100m and 200m)
• World Athletics ranking: #359 (100m, women’s senior)
• Competed at European Athletics U23 Championships (2021, Tallinn — 4x100m relay)
• Member of Maccabi Rishon LeZion athletics club

Social Media and Sponsorships

Alina Drutman is active on Instagram at @ppvch.a. No publicly confirmed commercial sponsorships have been identified through available sources, though her profile as Israel’s top women’s sprinter and her growing social media presence make her an increasingly visible figure in Israeli athletics and sports marketing circles.

Alina Drutman is an Israeli sprinter born November 19, 2001, in Ukraine, who immigrated to Israel in 2018. She is the Israeli national champion in the 100m and 200m sprint events, a two-time Maccabiah Games gold medalist, and holds personal bests of 11.55 (100m) and 23.84 (200m). She competes for Maccabi Rishon LeZion and is currently ranked approximately #359 in the world in the women’s 100m by World Athletics.