“I know I will never walk again (…) But I may win my twelfth gold medal elsewhere.” The German cyclist Kristina Vogel, Olympic champion and eleven times world champion, was optimistic before the press after the accident suffered in June after which she was left paraplegic.
What should I regret? The situation is what it is. Obviously I will find other goals “, launched the 27-year-old, smiling on a wheelchair at the Berlin clinic from which she called the press.
At the end of last week, she arranged an exclusive interview with Der Spiegel magazine to publicly announce that she would become a paraplegic, after colliding at high speed with another cyclist, a Dutchman, during indoor training at the Cottbus velodrome.
“I am not a machine, there were times when I had to learn to shed tears,” he acknowledged. But I’m here, it doesn’t matter on two wheels or on four wheels. I must not hide, I would like to be independent.
Asked about her broken hopes of improving her record, she was stoic: “It is a dream that is now forbidden to me. But maybe I will win my twelfth gold medal elsewhere, “he said without specifying whether he values the option of participating in sports for the disabled.
For the first time since the accident, she was authorized by the doctors to return home in the next few days, to her city of Erfurt. “I want to get my life back and give up foreign aid as much as possible,” he said.
His spinal cord was severed at the level of the seventh vertebra, thus losing all sensation in his legs.
The German, Olympic team speed champion in 2012, won the individual title in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She also won team gold in the 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2018 World Cups, while at the individual level she won in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018, and at the keirin world championships in 2014, 2016 and 2017. AP