It is a week of mixed emotion for two of Germany’s top athletes - javelin thrower Linda Stahl and shot putter David Storl.
At the age of 30, Stahl, the 2010 European champion, has announced her retirement from the sport after finishing 11th in Rio last week while Storl, 26, has revealed he is planning to compete at the next two Olympics.
Stahl bows out after a brilliant athletics career to fully pursue the other side of her life as a urologist at Leverkusen Hospital.
As she said: 'While others have rested after training, I was already standing in the operating room.'
Her record of consistency at the major events has been immense, ever since she became European Athletics U23 champion in Debrecen in 2007.
Three years later her crowning moment arrived in Barcelona when she won gold at the European Athletics Championships, taking the title with 66.81m.
Since then, she has stood on the podium at every European Championships winning bronze in Helsinki (2012) and Zurich (2014) before climbing up a step for silver in Amsterdam last month, with a last-round throw she is unlikely to ever forget.
At the time Stahl was in fifth after a series that never hinted at what would follow (60.40m, 60.80m, 59.19m, 59.31m, x) before she reached a brilliant 65.25m. It brought silver and remains the final ‘season’s best’ of her career.
She could not reproduce that form in Rio, four years on from her superb Olympic bronze in London, and she did not make the cut in the final, finishing 11th (59.71m) overall.
And now for the future… Speaking to Leichtathletik.de, Stahl, who will focus on completing her dissertation, added: 'Without the job, I would have not stopped and would have probably never found the right time. That's good, otherwise I would probably now be in free fall. I am pleased with what I’ve been able to achieve throughout my career.'
She leaves with a personal best of 67.32m from 2014 which puts her eighth on the all-time European Athletics rankings.
Storl has had a great summer too, cementing his place in the sport’s history as the first man to win the European Athletics shot put title three times in a row.
A double world champion too, Storl triumphed in Amsterdam with 21.31m and was seventh in Rio with 20.64m, four years after winning silver in London.
But Tokyo in 2020 and then the 2024 Games are very much on his mind.
He told DPA: 'I am 26 and I actually expect to compete in two more Olympics.'