The Door She Opened
Nooralotta Neziri ran the race that broke a Finnish barrier no one thought could be broken. Then she watched five other women run through the door she opened.
At the Kaleva Games on the evening of 1 August 2025, Nooralotta Neziri ran 12.73 in the 100m hurdles. It was a personal best, eight hundredths faster than she had ever run before, and it put her back among the fastest in Finland.
Five Finnish women who had all broken thirteen seconds stood on the same start line that night. The result was bigger than one race: proof that a barrier once thought beyond Finnish sprint hurdles had become a shared standard.
To understand why that moment was so loaded, you have to go back eleven years.
The barrier that wasn't.
It is summer 2014. The venue is Kuopio. Nooralotta Neziri is 21 years old, a Pori girl with a Macedonian-Albanian surname and a stubborn streak, and she has just run the 100m hurdles in 12.98 seconds.
It is the first time a Finnish woman has ever broken 13 seconds in the event.
For decades, the 13-second barrier had been Finland's invisible ceiling in women's sprint hurdles. It was the line nobody on the Finnish side of the track had been able to cross. Coaches talked about it like it was a national tax. Athletes were told, gently, that getting close was the dream — that crossing the line might not be in the cards for a Finn.
Nooralotta crossed it.
She has been clear about what she thinks that meant. Asked years later whether her run had any impact on what came after, she didn't dodge.
“Before sub-13 was broken, it was considered impossible. Once it was broken, others started to believe in it too.”
Quietly, without fanfare, she had moved a number in a lot of people's heads.
The trailblazer's tax.
What you don't always hear in stories about being first is the cost.
From 2012 onward, Nooralotta won every single Finnish national title in the 100m hurdles she entered — a streak only broken by 2017, the year she had to abandon her season entirely to illness and injury. She held the Finnish national record at 12.81 from 2016. She was Finland's only credible international hurdler.
She was also, in those years, often the only Finnish woman in the sub-13 statistics list. Year after year.
Alone at the top.
And then the dam broke.
For comparison: between Finland's first official women's hurdles event and Nooralotta's 12.98 in 2014, the number of Finnish women who had broken 13 seconds was zero.
Within a decade of her run, the number was six.
- 2014 Nooralotta Neziri · the first 12.98s
- 2019 Annimari Korte · Joensuu 12.72s
- Jun 2024 Reetta Hurske · Kuortane 12.68s
- Jul 2024 Lotta Harala · La Chaux-de-Fonds 12.65s
- 2024 Saara Keskitalo · Joensuu 12.84s
- 2025 Vilma Mäki · the sixth < 13s
Nooralotta had opened a door, and an entire generation walked through it.
The field.
When they lined up next to each other at the Kaleva Games on 1 August in Leppävaara, Espoo, they were part of something no Finnish track had ever seen: five women on the same start line who had all broken 13 seconds. Lotta Harala. Reetta Hurske. Nooralotta Neziri. Saara Keskitalo. Vilma Mäki.
Five.
Nooralotta ran a personal best — 12.73, an improvement of eight hundredths on the time she had run nine years earlier. Her performance beat the Tokyo qualifying mark.
What happened next.
Five weeks later, on the last hurdle rep of her last workout in Chiba, Japan, Nooralotta's right knee gave way. Torn ACL. Damaged meniscus. Tokyo was over before it began.
The Finnish team headed to Tokyo without her.
Two Finnish women made the World Championship semi-finals — the first time in years Finland had two women in a global hurdles semi.
The class of '14 — the year Nooralotta first broke 13 — had become a national power.
What it means to be first.
There is a particular kind of athlete who is remembered because she set every record there is to set in her event.
There is another kind who is remembered because she made the records possible. Because she ran the unrunnable time and, in doing so, dragged everyone behind her into the belief that they could do it too. Because the people who eventually went faster than her did so on a track she had paved.
Nooralotta Neziri is the second kind.
The Finnish women's 100m hurdles is, in 2025, the deepest women's sprint hurdles group in Finnish history. Six women under 13 seconds. Multiple semi-finalists at global championships. A European champion. A European indoor champion. A national record that is currently 12.65 and falling. Five women on a single Finnish national championship start line who have all run sub-13.
None of it would exist in this form if a 21-year-old from Pori hadn't run 12.98 in Kuopio in 2014 and proved the impossible thing was simply a thing.
She opened the door. The rest of Finland walked through it.