Clara Klug is now learning chess. This is quite appropriate for someone who passed the Abitur with a grade of 1.2. A friend gives her lessons and also homework. “You need alternatives,” says the 27-year-old. She would never have thought that she would play chess when the Paralympics were just around the corner.
Klug can still remember her fall well. In Östersund, deepest Sweden, at the end of January, it was the Biathlon World Cup. During training, in the last left-hand bend before the entrance to the shooting range, she unexpectedly drove past her companion Martin Härtl on the inside. “Stop!” he could still call out, but it was already too late. She slid down a steep slope, rolled over, her stick, her skis, everything broke, but not only that: her shoulder hurt because she had landed hard on her right arm.
At first she thought nothing of it. At most a bruise. Only after she returned to Munich, where Klug lives and was born, did she go to the hospital. The doctors at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar then told her: Tuberculum majus fracture, the bony prominence on the head of the humerus was broken. And her dream of participating in the Paralympics in Beijing as well.
“None of us really wants to go to Beijing, but we all want to go to the Paralympics,” says Klug. “That’s where a dream comes crashing down. On the other hand, those games are probably the ones you can best do without.” Now that there is also war at a time when the Olympic truce should be preserved.
Hairline crack in the metacarpal: She fell in December
The almost blind biathlete Klug won two bronze medals at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang with her companion Martin Härtl, and the following year three titles at the World Championships in Canada. The cross-country skier Klug, on the other hand, secured another precious metal with Härtl at that World Championships in Prince George, British Columbia. Paralympic gold is still missing in her collection, which is one of the reasons why she wanted to start in Beijing. In South Korea, she carried the German flag at the closing ceremony.
But looking back doesn’t help much when so many things are going wrong in the present. Already in December, Klug, who competes for PSV Munich, fell at the World Cup race in Canmore, Canada, with a hairline fracture in her metacarpal bone. Another left turn. She doesn’t blame Härtl, her companion runner: “As a guide, he did everything he could. You still have to find trust in each other again.” Klug fought back, she didn’t want to give up Beijing – until the crash in Östersund, which robbed her of her last energy. Energy, of which she had already lost a lot during the last two years of the pandemic – also far beyond sport. “It was a tough time,” says Klug.
Klug and Härtl at the medal ceremony in Pyeongchang.
(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa)
In March 2020, Klug and Härtl were already at the World Cup, back in Östersund, less than 24 hours before the start, all races were canceled due to the pandemic. In the months that followed, like many other top athletes, Klug fell into a mental hole. In May she had to undergo abdominal surgery, in the summer she suffered a double ligament tear, in the fall severe bronchitis ruined her training. There were no competitions anyway. And when they started again, she fell again, in Planica.
The mask becomes an obstacle, it reduces Klug’s sense of space
The pandemic also affected her in everyday life. What she generally takes with her: She sees less and less. Klug was born with a degenerative retinal disorder, now she only recognizes patterns with her left eye and nothing at all with her right. “I’ve been going blind for 26 years, the little I see is getting even less. It’s not nice and it’s not very easy mentally either.” Klug was more disoriented than usual on the tram, where they were unsettled by the masks the other passengers wore, muffling their voices.
But her own mask also became an obstacle because it diminished her sense of space. “With a mask, I feel one hundred percent more disabled than I am,” said Klug a year ago in an SZ interview. She was supposed to keep her distance in the supermarket, but of course she didn’t know if it was really 1.5 meters. She didn’t go shopping for a year, also because of the anxiety she had because of it. She preferred to let friends do it for her. Also because she no longer wanted to be snapped at at the bakery after she got too close to someone again.
After all, she had Buddy, her companion dog, which she had bought as an everyday helper. “But he’s also bad at looking at the distance rules in the supermarket,” says Klug.
Last November, a dispute broke out in the German Paraski team
Nevertheless, she fought her way out of the deep, thanks to her family and thanks to Härtl, her guide. Whenever possible, the athlete, who has been released from her service with the Bavarian police, drives with him to Kaltenbrunn, a snow hole near Garmisch, to train on the cross-country ski run.
But the obstacles did not want to get any smaller. Last November, a dispute broke out in the German Paraski team at the training camp in Livigno. “There are rivalries among each other, a concrete incident with another athlete. And that, although you would have to support yourself. The national coach didn’t have a lucky hand either,” says Klug openly.
What else has to come together? Soon after came the two left-handers in Canmore and Östersund. Klug doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, she’s on sick leave for now. She was also recently in corona quarantine, she used the time to deal intensively with the Olympics in Beijing: “I lost all interest there.”
Maybe it’s all better the way it is, Munich-Pasing instead of Beijing, chess instead of a shooting range, “just give me a break and then enjoy it too”. In the past ten years she has almost never been able to: let go. And if it knocks you out of the curve like Klug does, then that can also be the beginning of something new.