Biathlete Vanessa Voigt at the 2022 Olympics: against all expectations – sport

When Vanessa Voigt thinks of the Olympic moment that shaped her the most as a child, she thinks of a gym. Not snow, she doesn’t even have skis in mind, although it would be easy to list the biathletes from the surrounding area. Voigt comes from Seligenthal near Oberhof, and there are a number of people from the region who have been able to celebrate great success: Andrea Henkel, Kati Wilhelm and Erik Lesser, for example. But Voigt experienced her biggest fan moment when weightlifter Matthias Steiner won the Olympics.

A year ago, Voigt was not part of the German World Cup team, now she is at the Olympic Games for the first time, finished fourth in the individual competition, and of course: It took her a few days to process all the impressions. Also because of Corona. “There’s a lot going on around there with all the people who are really totally masked,” she says. The white males who take the PCR tests, they amused the 24-year-old. It’s all a bit exciting, but the past few years have also been exciting for Voigt. And the fact that the biathlete is now at the start in China also has something to do with how she deals with her experiences.

A year and a half ago, cartilage damage in the shoulder called everything into question

Beijing, 2008: Matthias Steiner becomes the face of the games, it is the story behind his gold that moves many. Because he managed to move on after the death of his wife. And now that the most coveted titles in sport are being awarded again in Beijing and the neighboring mountain region, Vanessa Voigt is there, she says: You could see from Steiner that “strength doesn’t always have to do with lifting weights. It’s that there’s also a lot going on in your head. I think that’s the case with every sport.”

A year and a half ago, Voigt had to have an operation, she had cartilage damage in her shoulder and could no longer lift her arm. “The doctors said: We’ll put competitive sports on the back burner for the time being. We have to see that it works like that again,” she says. At the age of twelve she had already switched to ski boarding school to pursue her dream of biathlon.

There hasn’t been anyone like Voigt recently in German biathlon: it’s rare for someone to show up in the World Cup and assert themselves in the team right away. Shoulder surgery in 2020, cysts also had to be removed, and she couldn’t do anything with the gun for eight weeks. She then won the second-rate IBU Cup anyway. After her World Cup debut at the end of last season, Voigt took advantage of her first chances this winter: a twelfth place in the individual, a tenth in the sprint at the beginning of December, the association norm for Beijing was already cracked.

Until then, the Olympics had only been a secret dream of Voigt’s, she wasn’t thinking about these games, more about the ones in four years. When she was able to pick up the national team’s outfits, it was “very special,” she says. “If everyone wishes you the best of luck for the Olympics… you felt so proud and honored.”

Shooting is her great strength, she sinks almost 90 percent of the targets reliably; she is one of the best. Also because they are usually not impressed when their competitors are firing projectiles around them. With a mental trick she can only focus on herself and the weapon. When she sees the mat, a special word comes to her head, Voigt comes into “a state of flow”, as she calls it herself: “I then forget everything around me.” That often works, but not always. At her Olympic debut with the mixed relay last Saturday, she made two penalty loops as the starting skier. A start that can gnaw at you for a long time. Voigt put skis, sticks and gun in the corner and also skipped training. Not out of frustration, Voigt said to himself, “I know I can do it.”

When the first shot misses, she asks: “Is it starting again?”

Just let biathlon be biathlon, she needs that sometimes. Last summer she “dared a big step,” says Voigt, she now trains two weeks a month in Ruhpolding, two weeks at home. In Oberhof there is everything to become a really good biathlete, she says, “but if you don’t have anyone in training every day to measure yourself against, it’s difficult to assess where you are right now”. In Bavaria she trains with the women’s national coach Kristian Mehringer and with others from the German team. She has improved a lot, especially on the cross-country ski run. The shoulder remains a neuralgic spot, “you always have to work on it, do your exercises”.

Open detailed view

Back in Zhangjiakou, two days after the disappointment with the relay, Voigt comes back to the shooting range in the individual, the first shot: misses. “Of course it wasn’t that easy,” she says, “with everything that happened before. I didn’t know: is it going to start like this again?” She hit the next 19 targets, finishing fourth, her best career result. Since these television pictures of how she hugged her brother immediately after crossing the finish line – he works as a photographer at the Olympics – Voigt has become known to many people: Who is going to the Olympics for the first time and just misses bronze – by 1.3 seconds?

Of course, she would have loved to have stood on the podium with Denise Herrmann, the Olympic champion. The pain of a missed opportunity doesn’t automatically diminish just because you’re new to it. “It’s still not really ticked off,” says Voigt a few days later, every now and then she has “five minutes” in which she deals with these 1.3 seconds and asks: Where else could I have gotten them? In any case, it wasn’t the final lap, nobody else was as fast as she was. “Maybe it should be like that,” she says, “so that I can go into the next races even more motivated”.

Benedikt Doll and Philipp Nawrath then made her a medal with a four on the front. One thing is already certain: Vanessa Voigt has arrived in the German team.