Timea Rankl: The Teenage Sprinter from Appenzell Who Is Already Rewriting Swiss Athletics History

There is a story that Timea Rankl has told more than once, and it captures something essential about who she is and where she comes from. In September 2021, she went to Weltklasse Zürich — the storied Diamond League meeting at the Letzigrund stadium — not as an athlete, but as a spectator. She was twelve years old. She stood at the front, right against the barriers, collecting autographs and receiving armlets from competitors. A winning athlete handed her a bouquet of flowers.

“And there I knew,” she later said, “that I want to run down there one day and give my bouquet to a child.”

Three years later, in September 2024, she was invited back to that same Letzigrund — this time in spikes. She had just returned from the World U20 Championships in Lima, Peru, with a silver medal around her neck and a Swiss national record to her name. In a special invitation race called “The Next Kambundji,” held as part of the Weltklasse Zürich eve-of-competition program, she won. And she ran 11.61 seconds, breaking the Swiss Under-18 100-meter record that Mujinga Kambundji herself had set at the same venue fifteen years earlier.

She was fifteen years old.

Roots: Speicher, Appenzell Ausserrhoden

Timea Katharina Rankl was born on December 20, 2008, and grew up in Speicher, a small municipality in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden in northeastern Switzerland. It is a quiet, scenic community — part of the Appenzellerland region that edges up toward the Alps — not the kind of place that typically produces sprint prodigies. But Rankl, who grew up with her parents and an older sister in the fresh air of the Ausserrhoden countryside, was almost always in motion from the time she was a toddler.

Her parents noticed, when she was around three or four years old, that she had unusual natural speed for her age. When she was five, her mother — who helped lead junior training sessions — enrolled her in badminton. Rankl was good at it. She has since admitted, with some humor, that she probably would have been a decent badminton player. Riding horses is another passion she lists among her interests, though she acknowledges there is never enough time for everything.

But running fast was always what she wanted to do. The pivot toward athletics happened in April 2017, when her parents discovered a “Speedtraining” program run by Appenzellerland Sport in the nearby town of Teufen. Rankl was eight years old. She attended the summer speed sessions and impressed her coaches enough that she was recommended to take up formal athletics. In January 2018, she began training on Tuesdays at LA Speicher, the local athletics club, while continuing the Speedtraining through the warmer months and still managing badminton twice a week along with piano and Kornett lessons.

She was ten, managing a schedule that most adult athletes would find exhausting. The priorities would sort themselves out soon enough.

The Kids Cup Years: A Talent Announces Itself

In the summer of 2018, Rankl entered her first local competitions: the UBS Kids Cup and the Swiss Athletics Sprint, both village-level events that feed into a national pathway. She won both, surprising herself and everyone around her. She went on to win the cantonal finals of Appenzell Ausserrhoden/Appenzell Innerrhoden for both competitions — and with those victories came entry to the Swiss national finals.

At the UBS Kids Cup national finals in Zurich, she placed 20th. At the Swiss Athletics Sprint national final in Lausanne, she finished fifth. For a first-year athlete at age nine, those results were remarkable, and they confirmed to her coaches that something special was developing.

In 2019, she improved at both: 12th at the UBS Kids Cup nationals, and more importantly, runner-up (Vizeschweizermeisterin) at the Swiss Athletics Sprint — winning a national silver medal in the 60-meter sprint. She has described that result as “the definitive starting gun for my great passion and my love of sprinting.” It was the moment she stopped hedging her athletic bets. She quit badminton, increased her athletics training to twice a week, and began mapping out a much larger future.

Over the following years through the Under-16 age group, she consistently reached the Swiss national finals in sprint events — a steady, unbroken record of development.

The Club Move and a New Chapter

In autumn 2022, Rankl made a significant change: she left LA Speicher and joined TV Teufen Leichtathletik, the athletics section of the Teufen sports club where she had first done speedtraining. TV Teufen has a well-regarded athletics program and competes across Swiss regional and national competitions. The move positioned her within a stronger training environment as she entered the Under-16 and then Under-18 age groups. She would continue working within the Appenzellerland Sport framework that had supported her from the beginning, and around this same time she also transitioned into the Sportschule Appenzellerland Sport — a sports school program based in Teufen that allows talented athletes to balance academic demands with intensified athletic training.

The 2023 season showed the early fruits of the transition. Rankl won the Swiss Under-16 championship in the 60 meters and took the U16 Visana Sprint national title — a clean sweep of the two major short sprint championship events at her age level.

The 2024 Breakthrough: A Season That Changed Everything

The 2024 indoor season offered an early preview of what was coming. Competing at the Swiss Under-18 Indoor Championships, Rankl finished as runner-up (Vizeschweizermeisterin) in the 60 meters, running 7.53 seconds. She also placed sixth in the shot put, reflecting the multi-event background she had maintained through her earlier development years.

Then, in February 2024, came the call that changed the trajectory of her year: Swiss Athletics invited her to join the Under-20 national team’s 4×100-meter relay squad for training camps. She was fifteen, barely in the U18 category, and was being considered for the U20 national program. It was an early signal of just how rapidly the federation was taking notice.

The outdoor season unfolded at a pace that was almost hard to track. In May 2024, she set personal bests of 11.82 in the 100 meters and 24.93 in the 200 meters. Then in June, the international program accelerated sharply. Competing in Mannheim, Germany, in her first international outing, the Swiss Under-18 4×100 relay team — which included Rankl — broke the Swiss U18 4×100 record, shattering a mark that had stood since 2011 and clocking 45.08 seconds. The previous record had been untouched for thirteen years.

She won the U18 EM trials over the 100 meters, earning selection for the Under-18 European Championships in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, in July 2024. There, she made history of a quiet but significant kind: she became the only 2008-born athlete (meaning the youngest eligible year of birth) in Europe to make the Under-18 100-meter final. She finished seventh and earned a diploma — a result that, given her age relative to the field, was genuinely impressive. As part of the Medley Relay team, she helped the Swiss squad to fifth place and a new national record, running in both the preliminary round and the final over the 100-meter leg.

What came next was not originally in anyone’s plans for her.

Lima 2024: Making Swiss Athletic History

Based on her performances through the first half of the 2024 season, Swiss Athletics made a bold call: they added Rankl to the Under-20 World Championships 4×100 relay team for Lima, Peru. She was still fifteen years old, technically a U18 athlete, and was being selected to represent Switzerland at a World Championship one age category above her own. She was, by some accounts, the youngest athlete at the entire U20 competition in her relay events.

The Swiss U20 women’s 4×100 team — Timea Rankl, Lia Thalmann, Chloé Rabac, and Alicia Masini — entered the World Championships with credible but not gold-medal expectations. What happened over the course of August 31, 2024, was something Swiss athletics had never seen before.

Rankl served as the lead-off (starting) runner in both the preliminary round and the final. In the final, the Swiss team crossed the finish line in third place. Then Australia, who had finished second, was disqualified. Switzerland was elevated to silver. The team’s time — 44.06 seconds — was a new Swiss national Under-20 record. More than that: it was the first U20 World Championships relay medal in the 38-year history of Swiss U20 athletics at the World Championships level. The squad was later named “Team of the Year 2024” at the Swiss Athletics Night.

Rankl was not an ancillary contributor. As the starting runner in both rounds, she set the tone for each race. Her role was as essential as anyone else’s on the team.

The Letzigrund Moment: “The Next Kambundji”

Two days after returning from Lima, Rankl went to Zurich. There, as part of the eve-of-Weltklasse programming, she competed in a special 100-meter invitation race called “The Next Kambundji” — a title that carries the full weight of Swiss athletics history, given that Mujinga Kambundji is one of the most celebrated sprint talents the country has ever produced.

Rankl won the race. She ran 11.61 seconds. That time broke Kambundji’s Swiss Under-18 100-meter record that had been set at the very same venue fifteen years earlier — the time had been 11.66. Rankl’s 11.61 was five hundredths faster. It was, by any standard, an extraordinary performance, made more remarkable by the fact that she was running it essentially two days after the emotional and physical expenditure of a World Championship relay final.

When asked how she was capable of such a run so quickly after Lima, she gave an answer that revealed a great deal about her mental approach: “After the silver medal at the World Championships, I had no more great expectations of myself. So I went to the start absolutely relaxed and put no pressure on myself. I just had fun seeing my U18 teammates again and closing the season together. This is proof to me that with joy I can achieve a great deal.”

2025: Triple Swiss Champion, Diamond League Debut, and More Records

Rankl entered 2025 as a Swiss Athletics National Team member in both individual events and the U20 relay — a formal recognition of what she had accomplished. She began attending the Fachmittelschule (FMS) at the Kantonsschule Trogen, a cantonal school that allows her to continue her education while maintaining her athletic program. She was also named Sportschülerin des Jahres (Sports Student of the Year) by Appenzellerland Sport in February 2025.

The 2025 indoor season brought more hardware: she was runner-up in the 60 meters at the Swiss Under-18 Indoor Championships with a time of 7.51 seconds — a new personal best — and won the shot put event at the same championships. She also competed at the open (senior) Swiss Indoor Championships in the 60 meters, qualifying for the semifinal against significantly older athletes.

Outdoors, the season accelerated again. In June 2025 at the qualification trials in Meilen, she ran under 24 seconds in the 200 meters for the first time — clocking a personal best of 23.94 seconds — and posted 11.62 in the 100 meters. Those performances earned her selection for two major European youth events: the European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF) in Skopje, North Macedonia, and the Under-20 European Championships in Tampere, Finland.

Also in June, the Swiss Under-18 national relay team broke the 4×100 Swiss record — first to 44.80 in Zofingen, then improved again to 44.07 in Mannheim. Rankl was a key component of both relay efforts.

At the EYOF in Skopje in late July 2025, Rankl placed seventh in the 200-meter individual final — seventh in Europe in her age group — and contributed to the silver medal won by the Swiss Medley relay squad (a 100-200-300-400 format), which ran a new Swiss record of 2:05.93. Switzerland’s EYOF 2025 campaign was historically successful, winning 22 medals — nearly double any previous summer EYOF total — and Rankl’s relay silver was part of that historic team effort.

In August 2025, she made her Diamond League debut at Athletissima Lausanne, competing both in the 100-meter Vorprogramm (pre-meet invitation race) and as part of the U20 relay team. The appearance marked her entry onto one of the sport’s most prestigious circuits — a significant milestone for any athlete, let alone a sixteen-year-old from Speicher.

At the Swiss Under-18 outdoor championships, she was triple gold: 100 meters (11.75), 200 meters (24.07), and shot put (14.68 meters). Three national titles in one championship meet.

At the Under-20 European Championships in Tampere, she competed as part of the Swiss 4×100 relay squad, which finished fourth — just off the podium but a respectable result in a competitive field.

November 2025 brought significant news on the sponsorship front: Nike announced it would be outfitting Rankl going forward, a meaningful commercial relationship for a sixteen-year-old athlete that speaks to the confidence major athletic brands now have in her trajectory.

Into 2026: Eyes on Eugene

The World Athletics profile for Rankl shows active 2026 season’s bests, confirming she remains in competition. In February 2026, she competed at the Swiss Under-20 Indoor Championships in the shot put, winning bronze with 12.61 meters — though she was unable to compete in the running events due to a foot inflammation, a minor setback she is managing carefully as the season develops.

Her stated goal for 2026 is clear: compete at the World Athletics U20 Championships in Eugene, Oregon — the spiritual home of American track and field at Hayward Field — both as an individual 100-meter athlete and as part of the Swiss 4×100 relay squad. The championships are scheduled for August 2026. Given that she will still be only 17 at the time, and given the trajectory of the past two years, the goal is entirely realistic.

Her longer-term targets, articulated on her personal website and through her Sporthilfe athlete profile, are comprehensive: an international career that includes European Championships, World Championships, and the Olympic Games, both as an individual sprinter and as a relay athlete. She has watched Mujinga Kambundji — her generational landmark and, in a very real sense, the standard against which her development is being measured — achieve exactly that. She is walking the same path, several years younger than Kambundji was at comparable milestones.

Training Structure and Support Network

Rankl works with a coaching team that reflects the complexity of her ambitions. Her primary sprint coach and overall planning is handled by René Wyler (Appenzellerland Sport), who has been central to her technical development. The TV Teufen club structure is overseen by club coach Karl Wyler. National relay training is coordinated by Aurélie Gutschmidt, the Swiss federation’s staffel (relay) trainer who works out of Bern Wankdorf with the national relay squads. Strength and mobility training is handled by Florian Auer.

Beyond the athletic coaching, she works with a mental performance coach — Lis Schläpfer of mindtuning — a detail that reflects the professionalism with which her development is being approached at a very young age. Her management is handled through Abrogans, the sports management group whose logo also appears on her website as a sponsor.

She is registered with Swiss Athletics and holds National Team (Nationalkader) status, as well as membership in the federation’s “Swiss Starter Future” talent development program, which identifies and supports the country’s most promising young sprinters.

She remains a student at the Fachmittelschule Kantonsschule Trogen, balancing coursework with an athletic schedule that now includes regular national team training camps and international travel. She lists spaghetti with morel sauce as her favorite meal, and riding horses as her hobby during holidays — a reminder that behind the records and the relay medals, she is still a teenager from a small Appenzell village who just happens to be one of the fastest young sprinters in Europe.

On Records, Role Models, and the Road Ahead

The Swiss Under-18 100-meter record that Rankl set at the Letzigrund in September 2024 was subsequently broken in May 2025 by Xenia Buri, who ran 11.58 — three hundredths faster. That’s how fast the Swiss sprinting landscape is moving right now, with Rankl and Buri pushing each other and the national records upward in one of the most productive eras for Swiss women’s sprinting since Kambundji’s emergence. The fact that Rankl’s record was broken within a year of her setting it speaks not to any shortcoming on her part, but to the remarkable depth of talent currently developing in Switzerland.

The athlete she has cited most consistently as her idol and inspiration is Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Jamaica’s multi-world and Olympic champion sprinter — a choice that tells you something about the scale of the dreams this teenager is carrying. One of Fraser-Pryce’s most quoted lines appears on Rankl’s “Über Mich” page: “Success is not about winning all the time; it’s about learning and growing from every challenge.”

For someone who is 17 years old and has already won a World Championships silver medal, broken multiple national records, made a Diamond League debut, and been named to the national team while still in secondary school, Rankl seems to understand that the journey is just beginning. She has goals that extend to Olympic participation as an individual athlete — something that will require significant continued improvement in absolute times — but the arc from 12.40 in the 100 meters (her best entering 2024) to 11.61 (by September of that same year) is the kind of improvement that makes long-term projections genuinely exciting.

The girl who stood at the barrier at Weltklasse Zürich collecting autographs in 2021 is now signing her own.

Personal Bests and Key Performances

• 100 meters: 11.61 (September 4, 2024 — Letzigrund, Zurich; Swiss U18 record at time of setting)
• 200 meters: 23.94 (June 14, 2025 — Meilen)
• 60 meters (indoor): 7.51 (February 22, 2025 — Athletik Zentrum, St. Gallen)
• 200 meters short track (indoor): 25.37 (January 19, 2025 — Athletik Zentrum, St. Gallen)
• 4×100 relay (U20): 44.06 (August 31, 2024 — Lima, Peru; Swiss U20 record, World Championship silver medal)
• 4×100 relay (U18): 44.07 (June 2025 — Mannheim; Swiss U18 record)

Sponsorships and Support

Rankl’s current sponsors and support partnerships include Nike (announced November 2025, outfitting partner), Abrogans (management and sponsor), Fromm Packaging, and the Stiftung Schweizer Sporthilfe (the Swiss sports aid foundation that provides financial support to developing elite athletes through a patron program). She is listed as an active Sporthilfe athlete with a patron relationship in place.

Social Media

Rankl is active on Instagram under the handle @timearankl. Her personal website is timea-rankl.ch, where she maintains a detailed record of her achievements, upcoming competitions, media coverage, and sponsor listings.

Career Highlights at a Glance

• Born December 20, 2008, in Speicher, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland
• World U20 Championships silver medalist, 4x100m relay, Lima 2024 (Swiss record: 44.06 — first Swiss relay medal in 38-year history of event)
• Winner, “The Next Kambundji” 100m invitational, Letzigrund Zurich, September 2024 — 11.61 (Swiss U18 record at time)
• EYOF Skopje 2025: 7th in 200m individual final; silver medal, Medley relay (Swiss record: 2:05.93)
• U20 European Championships Tampere 2025: 4x100m relay team, 4th place
• Swiss Under-18 Champion 2025: 100m, 200m, and shot put (triple gold)
• U18 European Championships Banská Bystrica 2024: 7th place, 100m final (youngest eligible athlete in Europe to reach the final)
• Multiple Swiss Under-18 national records: 100m, 4x100m U18, 4x100m U20, Medley relay
• Athlete of the Year (Sportschülerin des Jahres), Appenzellerland Sport, 2025
• Swiss Athletics National Team member; Swiss Starter Future program member
• Diamond League debut: Athletissima Lausanne, August 2025
• Club: TV Teufen Leichtathletik
• School: Fachmittelschule, Kantonsschule Trogen
• Sponsors: Nike, Abrogans, Fromm Packaging, Stiftung Schweizer Sporthilfe
• Instagram: @timearankl | Website: timea-rankl.ch