Julia Henriksson

Julia Henriksson (born 11 July 2000) is a Swedish athlete who competes as a sprinter. She has won Swedish national champion titles at 60m, 100m and 200m and is the Swedish indoors national record holder over 200 metres and joint record holder outdoors over 200 metres.

Early life
From Bjuv, Henriksson was a promising junior athlete but stopped athletics completely in high school, and didn’t race at all in 2016 and 2017. She started training again after her hiatus and started training full-time in 2019. She again had to pause her training to recover from stress fractures to her foot, in 2020.

Career
Competing in Mölndal in August 2021, Henriksson ran 100m in 11.37s which moved her up to fifth all-time by Swedish women and made her the fastest Swedish woman since 2014. Henriksson won the Swedish national 100m title in Norrköping in August 2022, with a time of 11.55 seconds.

After making her debut at a major championships by competing at the 2022 European Athletics Championships in Munich, albeit without qualifying from her heat, Henriksson set a new personal best 200m time of 23.15 in Helsinki.

In January 2023, at the Quality Hotel Games in Växjö, she achieved an indoor 200m time of 23.32s, a time that placed her second on Sweden's all-time list. The following month, she lowered her personal best time indoors over 200m again, to 23.26, before claiming national championship title victories over 60m and 200m in Malmö. This included a new personal best time of 7.30s for the 60m.

Henriksson qualified for the semi-finals in the 60m at the 2023 European Athletics Indoor Championships in Istanbul in March 2023.

Henriksson competed in the 200m at the Diamond League event in Stockholm in July 2023, finishing seventh. She competed in the 200 metres at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest in August 2023.

In Karlstad in February 2024, she set new personal best times over 60m, of 7.22 seconds, and 200 metres, of 23.03 seconds, an indoors national record. In May 2024, she lowered her personal best over 100 metres to 11.19 in Athens. She finished second on the 200 metres and fifth in the 100 metres at the 2024 Diamond League event in Stockholm.

She finished sixth in the final of the 200 metres at the European Athletics Championships in Rome in June 2024, having equaled the Swedish national record of 22.82 seconds in the semi final.

Personal life
Henriksson trained with IFK Helsingborg, however due to financial concerns after the covid-19 pandemic, the athletic club had to halt investment in athletes. As a result, Henriksson began supplementing her income by working as a receptionist at a health centre in 2022.