Second, I’m a high-risk patient, I’m a high-up paraplegic. First, I know how incredibly lousy it is to be artificially ventilated, how it feels to have your breath pulled out of your lungs. For example, if someone doesn’t get vaccinated against Covid, I have a real problem with that. “Some things just matter to me, and I had a big mouth even during my active days,” she says. To this day, Kristina makes headlines on the front pages of major newspapers. And because her story is all about a meteoric rise and a cruel fall. Because she was so incredibly good on a bike. She’s probably Germany’s most renowned ex-sportswoman since Steffi Graf. Even people who’ve never seen a team sprint know her. Someone who, more than three years after her last day on a road bike, can be seen making appearances alongside Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel, appearing on television as a commentator, reporter and pundit, and often as a talk show guest. It’s the story of a woman who went from being a well-known athlete to a national celebrity - in a way no one wants. This is the story of Kristina Vogel, Germany’s best-ever cyclist and one of the most successful track racers in history: a two-time Olympic, five-time European and 17-time world champion. “I saw someone walking away with the shoes, and I just hadn’t realised that they must have pulled on my legs before.” Kristina smiles as she continues: “At that moment I realised there’d be no more walking.”Īfter arriving by helicopter at the special clinic in Berlin, her fight for survival would last several weeks. She felt an urgent need for someone to take off her cycling shoes. “I didn’t feel any pain, but I told myself at that moment: ‘You have to stay awake.’” What she felt was an incredible pressure throughout her body. “For me, it was immediately clear, especially with the experience of my almost-fatal first fall, that this one was really serious,” says Kristina. She had decided to do an extra lap after finishing a training session and hit a Dutch cyclist, practising a standing start, at around 35mph. Just as it had been on the previous days on the Cottbus track, crowded and bustling as riders and teams from Kazakhstan to Colombia prepared for the races, a necessary step towards the UCI qualification events for the Tokyo Olympics. In the first moments after the accident, she was wide awake, and it was loud. But the coma didn’t come until she was in hospital. That the Indian team’s trainer was holding the IV drip. She realised at some point that the emergency doctor had arrived. Why everyone was running to her so frantically. She was only knocked out briefly when, on June 26, 2018, nine years after the first accident, she wondered why she was lying crooked on the cold concrete of the Cottbus cycling track, with her head facing down towards the track centre. In the worst moment of her life, Kristina wasn’t unconscious. That wasn’t even the worst moment in the life of the exceptionally talented Kristina Vogel. It was the tube that intubated her lungs and kept her from choking while she was in a coma. The scratching in her throat bothered her beyond belief. It was the life-support machines beeping in the ICU. She only remembers that a beeping sound drove her crazy, and she just wanted someone to turn it off. Or how the surgeons in the hospital operated on her for six hours. She also doesn’t know that a passer-by admonished the other first responders to not turn the unconscious cyclist onto her back under any circumstances, or else the spinal cord could be damaged. Her jaw was broken in two places, her thoracic vertebrae in one, her wrist too, and she lost five teeth.
GEARS TACTICS INJURED SKIN
Her head smashed into its side window so hard it split the skin on her cheeks, her nose and under her eyes. But she doesn’t remember how the tyres lost contact with the ground and whether she was still able to brake when the van cut across her.
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