Track & Field: Bringing the track a German flavor

Yet freshman Sebastian Steffen of the men’s track and field team fits that rare category. Steffen was part of the German B national team in 2008 after finishing fifth in the 200m at the German men’s championships. When he was 16, Steffen finished second in the 400m at the junior indoor German championships.

“He is possibly one of the greatest athletes on campus, but upon meeting him you would never guess because of the great humility he demonstrates,” said freshman John Hutton, Steffen’s roommate.

Steffen started track in fourth grade when a German coach saw him run at an elementary school event.

“He thought, ‘Hey, he looks pretty good,’ [and asked] ‘You want to join the track team?’ ” Steffen remembered.

Despite coming to campus as an international student, the freshman found the transition onto the Princeton team easy.

“I’m already a pretty old freshman, I guess, because in Germany we have 13 years of school and after that I had to serve for a year in civil service,” Steffen said.

“So I’m already two years older than everyone else — senile,” he joked.

After being given a choice between civil and military service — where, according to Steffen, “all you do is sit in front of buildings and do nothing” — he chose civil service.

“I worked in a hospital in a dialysis station,” Steffen said. “That was intense. That’s where people with malfunctioning kidneys come. I ordered supplies, I gave them their insulin — there were a lot of diabetes patients — I prepared breakfast for them, and fed them if they didn’t have arms or legs anymore.”

Steffen’s freshman indoor track season derailed unexpectedly due to an intramural volleyball accident — something the track team still teases him for.

“It was so dumb,” Steffen said. “I played intramural volleyball just for fun. I jumped up for a block and came down and stepped on the other guy’s foot and sprained my ankle really, really badly. What kind of sucks is that my right foot is still not as flexible as my other one so it still bothers me a little bit when I’m running curves.”

Since Steffen’s track team in Germany was small, he never genuinely got to experience real team spirit until he came to Princeton.

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“It’s really fun, the people are really nice, and it’s just a good community — everyone’s supporting each other,” Steffen said. “They only make fun of my accent and, I don’t know, some German stereotypes or something”.

Steffen has brought some aspects of his European track experience to Princeton.

“I think that at European track meets, fans use a lot of horns and other noisemakers,” junior co-captain Mike Eddy said. “Typically they don’t do that at collegiate meets in the U.S. Well, this winter Sebastian single-handedly managed to get horns banned at the Ivy League indoor track championships. He brought so many different horns and noisemakers that we had the meet announcer repeatedly declaring that ‘Horns are prohibited at the Ivy League championship.’ Needless to say, we can no longer use horns at track meets.”

Steffen has also started his own traditions on the team.

“For instance, I don’t shave on the day before a track meet. I don’t know, I just don’t do it,” Steffen said. “There’s a German saying that’s like, ‘If you don’t shave, you don’t lose.’ ”

He also collects all the safety pins used to attach his race numbers at track meets on a long chain.

“I also took a couple other people’s, [so now I] have like 30,” Steffen said.

With much of his collegiate career still ahead, the sprinter has a long list of athletic goals, including breaking the Princeton 200m record, advancing to the NCAA championships, reaching the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and, most of all, making his coach happy.

“[To make the Olympics], I have to run my [personal record] pretty much,” Steffen said. “I think that’s possible, though. I’m older now [and] I practice a lot more now.”

The “A” qualifying standard for the 200m at the 2009 world track championships was 20.59 seconds, just a hair faster than Steffen’s best time.

“My PR is 20.89, which is three-tenths off, so if the standard doesn’t change I hope I can make it,” he said. “That’s sort of like the big goal.”

He admitted that though he can’t imagine his life without track, he knows that professional athletics are not in his future. Steffen is currently on the math team and is thinking of majoring in economics and doing work in mathematics.

“For me, the education is far more important,” Steffen said. “For sports, I just got lucky. I’ve never even thought about being a professional athlete. That’s not an option at all. I just want to do education as well as I can here and do sports, and that’s it.”