Vetter was exposed to athletics at a very young age. Her father, Ronald Vetter, is a long-standing athletics coach and her mother, Gerda Vetter-Blokziel a two-time Dutch javelin champion. "I grew up on the track, running around from the age of four and five playing on the high jump mat," she recalls.[4]
Her breakthrough came in 2014 when she improved her previous personal best by a massive 444 points to 6316 points at that year's prestigious Hypo-Meeting in Götzis, Austria to place ninth. "Gotzis was really special," she remembered. "It is always fantastic to compete there because the crowd is so close to the track."[6] Later that year she finished seventh at the Zürich European Championships.[4]
In 2015, Vetter finished sixth at the Hypo-Meeting with a new personal best with 6458 points,[7] and won the heptathlon at the Mehrkampf-Meeting in Ratingen, Germany.[4][8] Despite an injury, she also competed in the heptathlon event at the 2015 World Championships in Athletics in Beijing, where she reached the 12th place with 6267 points.[4] "Bearing in mind I didn’t think I could even start the competition, mentally it was a really big step for me," she reflected later.[4]
European champion
She started the 2016 season with an eighth place at the Hypo-Meeting. In July, Vetter took a surprise victory at the European Championships heptathlon in her home town Amsterdam, with a score of 6626 points, an improvement of the national record of Dafne Schippers.[9][10] "To win that European title was amazing," she remembered. "Suddenly I was out of the shadow of the big girls."[4] At the 2016 Rio Olympics, however, she finished on a disappointing 10th place.[11]
She started the 2017 outdoor season with a seventh place in Götzis.[12] In August 2017, Vetter set a new national heptathlon record of 6636 points at the World Championships in London, where she won the bronze medal, behind 2016 Olympic champion Nafissatou Thiam (gold) and Carolin Schäfer (silver).[13] She concluded the season with a win at the heptathlon at the Décastar in Talence, France.[14] For the second year in a row she finished second in the IAAF Combined Events Challenge.[15]
At the 2018 Hypo-Meeting in Götzis, Vetter finished fourth behind Nafissatou Thiam, Yorgelis Rodriguez and Erica Bougard.[16] At the European Championships in Berlin she finished fifth place. The year 2019 was a difficult period in her career, due to injuries and doubts with the sport. She did not finish the combined events competitions at the European Indoor Championships in Glasgow, the Decastar in Talence and the World Championships in Doha. Depressed she did not start at the final event, the 800 meters. "I had physical injuries with my knee," she later explained. "But it was more than that. I was putting too much pressure on myself. I had a hard time enjoying athletics, and I had a battle inside my head."[17]
Come back
Hepthathlon world medallists at Oregon 2022 (L–R): Anouk Vetter (6867 pts), Nafi Thiam (6947 pts) and Anna Hall (6755 pts).
In 2021, Vetter made her come back winning the silver medal at the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics in Japan, with a new national record, behind Nafissatou Thiam who successfully defended her 2016 Olympic title.[18] She led through the first day before Thiam and after world champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson had to leave the competition due to an injury.[19]
In May 2022, she won the Hypo-Meeting in Götzis with a new national record after setting a meet record in the javelin throw of 59.81 m.[20] Later that year, she won silver at the World Championships in Eugene (USA) with yet another national record. She led the contest until the last event, when Thiam surpassed her.[21] In August at the Munich European Championships she had to withdraw from the competition due to an Achilles tendon injury.
