Name: Naomi Sedney
Date of birth: 17-12-1994
Place of residence: Arnhem
Event: 100m
Lifetime best: 11.24
Coach: Bart Bennema
Track club: ARV Ilion (Zoetermeer)
Naomi Sedney is a Dutch sprinter, specialising in the 100m and the 4x100m. On these distances she’s been part of the European (sub-)top for several years, with a gold medal on the 4x100m on the European Championships in Amsterdam as stand-out performance.
After several ‘try-out’- practices, Naomi joined the local track club in 2004, where she spend her younger years with a lot of fun but no extraordinary talent. It wasn’t until her 14th that her talent for sprint events started becoming apparent, and she got invited to weekly regional sprint training, which resulted in her first national (junior-) title in 2011. During these national championships Naomi also broke the ‘magic’ 12-second barrier for the first time on the 100m. At the time, it was good for a tenth spot on the all-time’s list for under-18’s.
This would also be the year that kicked off a row of junior tournaments, with the EYOF. As part of the 4x100m relay-team she won a gold medal at these championships. In the years that followed Naomi was also part of the relay-teams that went to the WCu20 (Barcelona, 2012) and ECu20 (Reïti, 2013), which resulted in another (European) medal, bronze this time. At the same time she finished high school and started college, studying Applied Psychology.
In her first year as a senior Naomi made some small steps towards the Dutch national top, and was brought along as an alternate to the European Championships in Zürich. Partly because of her participation at her first senior tournament she made the switch to national training centre papendal, where she would train with coach Rogier Ummels. It proved a fruitful decision: in 2015 Naomi went from 11.80 over 100m to 11.34, only one-hundredth of a second off the world-championships qualifier. Because of this spectacular progress and her young age, the Dutch Federation decided to forgive her the 0.01 second and allowed her to start on her first senior 100m in Beijing, only a couple months after her first junior 100m (ECu23, Talinn). In the same year Naomi switched from Applied Psychology to Psychology on university-level. A combination that got progressively harder through the years, as training started taking up more time. Currently she’s collecting points for her degree through self-study.
Since 2015 Naomi has been an important part of the Dutch 4x100m, and has competed in this event on 3 EC’s, 2 WC’s, and 1 Olympic Games. On two of these EC’s and two of these WC’s she has also competed in the 100m. Individually her highest placing has been a 10th place on the 100m at the EC of 2016 (Amsterdam), and a 34th place on the 100m at the WC in 2017 (London). On the 4x100m her best placing has been a 1st place on the EC of 2016 and a 8th place at the WC of 2017. Her PB stems from 2018, the last year she trained under Rana Reider, before he left the Dutch Federation and she made the switch to Bart Bennema.
Despite this list of accomplishments there’s so one goal that has remained unchecked in Naomi’s career: participation on the 100m at the Olympic Games. This is then, of course, the main aim of 2020, when the Olympic Games will be held in Tokyo.