Kristina Vogel facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Kristina Vogel

Vogel in 2022
Personal information
Born	(1990-11-10) 10 November 1990 (age 34) Leninskoye, Bishkek, Kirghiz SSR
Height	1.60 m
Team information
Discipline	Track
Role	Rider
Rider type	Sprinter

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, and became an eleven-time UCI World Champion. She was paralysed following a crash in June 2018.

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. 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.

In April 2009, Vogel was seriously injured after a collision with a minibus when riding on the roads near her home in Erfurt. She was in an artificial coma for two days. She recovered to compete at the 2010 UCI Track Cycling World Championships, where she finished fifth in the individual sprint and sixth in the team sprint alongside Miriam Welte. She also competed at the 2011 UCI Track Cycling World Championships.

Welte and Vogel on the podium at the 2012 Track World Championships

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. 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.

On 26 June 2018, in the Cottbus velodrome, Vogel collided at high speed with a Dutch junior cyclist who was practising a standing start. 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, and following the accident, he and fellow cyclist Max Dörnbach, using the hashtag #staystrongkristina, went on to raise €119,752 for her recovery. The Dutch cyclist was uninjured, but Vogel was left paralysed.

In addition to her track cycling career, Vogel was a part-time police officer before her accident. In 2019, she entered politics, standing for election as a candidate for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in Erfurt city council elections.

Major results

See also

In Spanish: Kristina Vogel para niños