The cross-country skiing coach Albert Kürner had always thought it was a cliché that professional athletes speak into microphones after success: that they have not yet “realized” what they have just achieved. On Tuesday of this week he knew how it feels. The chairman of the St. Peter ski club in the Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald district told him about the gold medal that Leonie Walter, 18, had won at the Paralympics in Beijing in the biathlon for visually impaired athletes over ten kilometers. Kürner then needed some time before he told his boss that he was going to take half a day off. The reason: “Today is not a day like any other.”
Kürner, 59, was Leonie Walter’s first coach. “The greatest man in the St. Peter ski club,” as Walter’s mother Renate said, which is why Kürner also gave an interview to SWR on Tuesday. He was asked if he was proud, he says. But “pride,” he says, “always smacks of arrogance.” Kürner says: “First and foremost, I’m happy for Leonie.”
The story of Leonie Walter, who was born visually impaired, took up cross-country skiing at the age of seven and was promoted at her home club, is one of many athlete biographies at the Paralympics concluding this weekend. At the same time, the story is an example of how sport can work for people with disabilities in Germany. And how to deal with a problem that the German Disabled Sports Association (DBS) often points out.
About Walter’s path, they say in the association: “We would like the procedure to be exactly the same.”
DBS President Friedhelm Julius Beucher has hardly missed an opportunity in recent years to mention that para-sport needs more youth. Otherwise there will be a lack of role models in the future to motivate people with disabilities to do sports. It is therefore in the interests of the association that two teenagers have clinched a large part of the German successes in Beijing in the past few days: As of Friday, Linn Kazmaier, 15, and Walter, also benefiting from the exclusion of Russia, won a total of eight medals. Michael Huhn, the junior national coach Para Ski-Nordisch, says about Walter’s path: “We would like to proceed in exactly the same way.”
The youngest in the German team: 15-year-old Linn Kazmaier (left) at the award ceremony.
(Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Albert Kürner didn’t have much previous experience in disabled sports, at least no “special training” as he says when Leonie Walter, who only has a few percent vision, came to the St. Peter ski club as a child. Cross-country skiing still worked when Kürner ran ahead of her. At some point in the competitions, he took a starting number himself so that people would no longer wonder what he was doing. He sometimes had to interrupt his work with the other children in the team to run with Leonie. A challenge “in quotation marks”, he calls it in retrospect.
At some point, Kürner spoke to Michael Huhn, the youth national coach at the base in Freiburg. The conditions there are professional, there is the nearby cross-country ski run on the Notschrei mountain pass, a large weight room, and a roller ski treadmill. Walter has been training there since she was 15. She has been going to boarding school for a year and a half. Her mother says: “We are really very lucky as parents.”
How relevant such biographies are for the association became clear again on Friday: Martin Fleig, 32, announced the end of his career, the flag bearer at the opening ceremony, biathlete and cross-country skier, wheelchair user, gold medalist from Pyeongchang 2018, silver medalist this time. Another athlete less.
The Para-Alpines prepare the umbrella organization the greater concern
More is now being done in para-sport to find successors. Positions for trainers in the regional associations are created and so-called talent scouts are employed. The idea comes from North Rhine-Westphalia: one person networks with self-help groups, schools and clubs and ensures that advertising gets where it is supposed to get. Also, so that people with disabilities find out about suitable sports offers. Other states followed suit, including Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria.
In the Nordic disciplines, says Michael Huhn, the greatest need to catch up is that more athletes find their way into the national team beyond Freiburg. In recent years, alpine winter sports have caused DBS greater concern. In 2018, series winner Anna Schaffelhuber was at the Paralympics for the last time and criticized the lack of young talent. There has been a junior national coach since 2019.
Maike Hujara used to be responsible for the Paralympic skiers, then she switched to the German Ski Association. When she returned three years ago in a new position with responsibility for young people, she first had to do a lot of groundwork. At least that’s what it sounds like when she talks about it.
She organized a sighting for three days in the Kühtai ski area in Tyrol and took everyone she knew with her. There were nine participants on the first day and twelve on the second. Her first step after that: build a team, organize races, open races for able-bodied people to young people with disabilities. Step two: work with the national associations on talent days, find young talent, talk to parents.
Your long-term goal is a complete structure from your first skiing to the national team. At the Paralympics 2026, the German team should be larger than this time, it includes a total of six athletes in alpine skiing. The short-term result of the sponsorship is two talents in Beijing: Leander Kress, 21, and Christoph Glötzner, 18, who both ride on one leg.
Bad luck: Christoph Glötzner after his fall in the training run.
(Photo: Christoph Soeder/dpa)
If you ask Glötzner what has changed for him as a result of the junior team, he says: “Things have really progressed, I learned to ski in a completely different way.” Hujara quantifies the difference between the funding in the Bavarian state association, which existed before, and that in the national team, with ten instead of three training courses. In other words: 50 instead of twelve days of skiing.
The challenges for Paralympic alpine skiing are great: accessibility on the mountain is often utopian, the material is expensive. A monoskibob like the one used by wheelchair user Anna-Lena Forster, the flag bearer at the opening ceremony and the second German gold medal winner in Beijing, costs as much as a family car. And skiing with a visual impairment is arguably one of the most fascinating, hard-to-imagine achievements at the Winter Paralympics ever. But it works, Hujara points out, if you can find guides who drive ahead.
She tells of a talent day in Winterberg, 60 participants were there, the material for it was provided. The ability of a visually impaired skier was so distinctive that he came along with her team for training and soon after that he drove his first race.
A lot also depends on the commitment of the families
Glötzner and Kress didn’t win any medals in Beijing, and in the case of Kress that also had something to do with the classification: single-legged athletes have a hard time with their time factor against the otherwise restricted competition on two legs. Glötzner, on the other hand, injured himself before his first planned start in training. Gaining experience was his goal in Beijing.
Like the story of the biathlete Leonie Walter, that of Glötzner also has something exemplary about it. It’s about commitment, in his case it’s that of the family, as youth coach Hujara emphasizes. Gloetzner lost his leg in a lawnmower-tractor accident when he was three years old. About six months after the operations, he went down the Steinberg in the Bavarian Forest with one ski and two crutches.
In the meantime, Glötzner not only contributes his own skills to the future of Paralympic sport. “An eight-year-old boy who only has one leg was a spectator at the Bavarian championships,” he says. “Since then, our families have been in contact. I showed him my ski cellar and ski crutches, which you can’t get anymore.” He bequeathed it to the boy. “So that he can train.”