Kristina Vogel (born 10 November 1990) is a former German track cyclist. During her career, she won two gold medals and a bronze at the Olympic Games,[1] and became an eleven-time UCI World Champion.[2] She was paralysed following a crash in June 2018.[3]
Life and career
Vogel was born in Leninskoye, a district of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and moved to Germany with her parents when she was six months old.[4] In 2007 and 2008 she competed at the Junior European and World Championships and became a six-time junior world champion and two-time junior European champion.
At the 2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Melbourne, Vogel and Welte won the gold medal in the team sprint. They set a world record in qualifying which they broke again in the final.[6] Vogel and Welte went on to win the first ever Olympic gold medal in the women's team sprint later that year in London, benefiting from competitors being relegated in both the semifinal and final. At the 2016 Summer Olympics, she won another gold, in the women's sprint, and a bronze medal in the women's team sprint again with Miriam Welte.[1]
On 26 June 2018, in the Cottbus velodrome, Vogel collided at high speed with a Dutch junior cyclist who was practising a standing start.[7] The heavy impact on the concrete floor caused several fractures, severing her spinal cord at the seventh thoracic vertebrae and consequently caused paraplegia. Vogel's teammate Maximilian Levy was the first to come to her aid,[8] and following the accident, he and fellow cyclist Max Dörnbach, using the hashtag #staystrongkristina, went on to raise €119,752 for her recovery.[9] The Dutch cyclist was uninjured,[10] but Vogel was left paralysed.[11][12]
In addition to her track cycling career, Vogel was a part-time police officer before her accident.[4][5][11] In 2019, she entered politics, standing for election as a candidate for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in Erfurt city council elections.[13]
