AWhen Sarah Voss had done her floor exercise and then the award ceremony at the Olympic qualification for German gymnasts in Munich, the winner wanted to make her feet, tired from the exertion, a little more comfortable. The 21-year-old slipped into the pink fur slippers that she had brought with her especially for it. “A friend’s gift on the eighteenth,” she said. Since then, the slippers have been a loyal companion at all competitions.
You could therefore fly with the Frankfurt-born athlete from the TZ DSHS Cologne to Joetsu in Japan at the beginning of July. The national team will have one last training camp there before the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Although the official nomination by the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) will not take place until June 29th, after a decision by the steering committee of the German Gymnastics Federation, the Hessian can be sure that she is in the quartet of head coach Ulla Koch and that she is her debut at the Olympics.
On Saturday, the German all-around champion from 2019 won the second and final performance test in front of several hundred spectators in the Olympiahalle and presented an exercise on the balance beam that is considered to be worthy of the final on the big stage.
As the only one in the field of candidates for the trip to Asia, she remained without major mistakes. At the table, the German champion presented a yurtschenko with a double screw, the hardest jump in the field, and had otherwise increased after her third place in the national championships in Dortmund. The sounds of Queens “The Show must go on” accompanied Sarah Voss during the last somersaults and twists. She consciously chose the music for her new choreography: as a request from last year to organize competitions again soon after the pandemic-related break. But also as a claim to oneself, despite all the obstacles that stood in her way, not to give up and to keep fighting.
Sarah Voss suffered from the fact that her training hall was closed and that she had to move to Bergisch Gladbach for a long time after weeks of practicing in her own garden, not only during the first lockdown in 2020. She was sick with Corona herself in October, had to be quarantined again in spring due to a positive test in her environment and was forced to take another interruption shortly before qualifying for the European Championships in Basel due to a failed test.
“That was very difficult for me,” she emphasizes – although her own illness apparently had no serious consequences and she is considered to have recovered. But their performance curve fell sharply before the EM. The repeated confrontation with unpleasant test results made her doubt herself and her body. She took action against it with her head, “it had to do 50 percent of the work”. Motivated by her “perfect environment”, she “bit into the edge of the table again” and, with a great deal of effort, brought back the automatisms that had been lost.
Not yet in top form in Switzerland and only on two machines at the start, Sarah Voss was back on a high level just when it came to the Olympic tickets. “I’ve never had such crazy preparation,” she says. But coaches, family, friends, “everyone believed in me, it was time I did it again”.
Sarah Voss will return to her homeland for the last measure on German soil. Here she learned the ABC of her sport as a child in the Wetzlar training facility from high bar Olympic champion Fabian Hambüchen. She still feels connected to the state to this day. Two of her companions, Amelie Föllinger and Anja Rheinbay, work as trainers in Frankfurt, the central training location for German women. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you again.”
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