In 18.68 seconds, some might carelessly eat a burger - Robyn Lambird, however, created a moment for the ages. Lambird is the first non-binary medalist at the Paralympic Games. Lambird took the bronze medal in the women's wheelchair sprint. Hot on the heels of Quinn, the Canadian soccer star winning the gold medal at the Olympics, this marks a special moment for LGBTQ representation at the Paralympics. For Lambird, who is from Australia, just being at the Paralympics was the fulfillment of a decade-long dream, they told a newspaper. This dream has now become a moment for the sports history books - congratulations!
Marcel Kittel never had mercy with his opponents in the final sprint of the Tour de France stages - but not with himself either. Now that his career has come to an end, the 14-time Tour stage winner summoned up his courage and made public the mental problems that accompanied him. "There were moments when I couldn't touch my racing bike. That was perhaps something that could be described as burnout or a depressive phase," Kittel told the "Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger". In 2015 and 2019 he took psychological help and learned for life: "I learned that I have to listen to myself and my heart."
When you're still having trouble in the family a year after nude photos for "Playboy," that in itself isn't good news. But we still want to praise our Paralympic swimming star Elena Kravtsov today. Kravtsov, who lives in Germany but hails from Kazakhstan, is ostracized by conservative parts of her family for the photos. But the swimmer, who is among the Paralympics participants because of a visual impairment, nevertheless stands by the pictures, telling Munich's Abendzeitung newspaper. "The message behind these photos was much more important to me than what parts of my family think about it. I believe that I have given many people courage and strength with it."
A puzzle for the mathematicians among us: The probability of sextuplets is one in 44 billion. What is the probability that half of these sextuplets will be on the same team at a Paralympic tournament? Admittedly, we can't work that out ourselves. But the performance of Arne, Bruno and Tom Vanhove from Belgium is an even 1 even without doing the math. Born in 1983, the boys were half of their parents' sextuplets who were born with a visual impairment - the other three Vanhove boys are sighted. Now the goalball players became the darlings of the Paralympics - after 2008 still Bruno participated alone in the Paralympics in Beijing, 2012 then Tom joined, Arne only after his studies now made the trio complete.
Coxswain Martin Sauer leaves the German Eight. With a victory in the rowing marathon on the Kiel Canal, Sauer now got a dignified farewell from the parade boat of the German Rowing Association. Incredibly strenuous 12.7 kilometers is the distance that the silver medal winners of the Tokyo Olympics had to complete. "We came out well," Sauer said of his final race. First coming out well and then steering confidently to the finish line in first place - that's how sweet any farewell should be. And for the fans there was something to look at and laugh about - because at the end of his career the rowers of the German Eight threw their boss into the cold canal.
In Berlin there is the TuS Makkabi, just as in Frankfurt am Main or in Munich: 100 years ago, the Maccabi movement was founded as an umbrella organization of Jewish gymnastics and sports clubs. At the anniversary celebration last weekend, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier reminded the audience that the clubs showed only one thing: that long before the National Socialists came to power, people of Jewish faith had been excluded from clubs. In the 1960s, many Maccabi clubs came together again and are still active today. To mark the 100th anniversary, the German Football Museum in Dortmund presented a gift that does justice to the special significance of these sports clubs. In a new online encyclopaedia, fans can find out about Jewish footballers and football officials - "Never Forget" is the apt title of the encyclopaedia.
If you want to establish a new tradition in 2021, you'll need staying power to make it happen - but luckily there's Jan Frodeno, the man with perhaps the world's longest staying power. The German triathlon world star led Team Europe to victory over Team America and an international selection at the inaugural Collins Cup. The Collins Cup is now expected to become something like the Ryders Cup already is in golf - a continental competition that fascinates fans. Hopefully Frodeno with his meanwhile already 40 years will hold out a little longer, without figureheads it could unfortunately quickly become dull with the new tradition...
