Christian Heilwagen/imago
Luge athlete Julia Taubitz is training in Oberhof for the World Championships in Oberhof
The training runs for the 51st Luge World Championships in Oberhof in the Thuringian Forest begin on Tuesday morning at 8.30 am. The official opening ceremony will take place on Thursday, and the medals will be awarded from Friday to Sunday. The program includes singles and doubles for men and women, with a sprint race also being held in each category. Then there is the team relay. In the sprint, the start is flying, which means that the time measurement only starts after about 100 meters.
With nine competitions, there are more in Oberhof than ever before at a luge world championship. In addition, for the first time, women and men will have the same number of competitions at the luge world championships. The women’s doubles races are new to the programme. World Championship medals for women were already awarded in 2022 in the classic doubles, but that was after a specially held race in Winterberg. In years when the Olympic Winter Games are held, there are actually no luge world championships. The women’s doubles were given their own race because they were not yet represented in the Olympic program in Beijing. In 2026 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo it will be different, there will be the Olympic premiere. There are no sprint competitions at the Olympics.
Oberhof is organizing the luge World Championships for the fourth time after 1973, 1985 and 2008. The frontrunner among the World Championship hosts is Königssee, where World Championship medals have already been fought for seven times on the world’s oldest artificial ice track. However, it remains to be seen when races can be held there again. The railway, inaugurated in 1969, was severely damaged by mudslides during the floods in Central Europe in July 2021. At least the reconstruction, which is planned for 2024, should not fail because of the finances. The federal government has made 53 million euros available for this purpose. A “CO2-neutral sports facility” is to be created. In Oberhof, where the second oldest artificial ice rink in the world was opened in 1971, people are environmentally conscious. The waste heat generated during the icing of the toboggan run is now used to heat the village.
Oberhof’s luge tradition is a proud one. In GDR times, athletes from the ASK Vorwarts Oberhof won more than 100 medals at the Olympic Games, World Championships and European Championships. The record of the successor club WSV Oberhof 05 cannot be compared with this, but it also produced exceptional athletes such as the seven-time world champion Jan Behrendt. The local hero at this year’s World Championships is Max Langenhan from neighboring Friedrichroda. The 23-year-old, multiple Junior World Champion, missed the start of the World Cup season due to a wrist injury, but made a splendid debut in the World Cup in Sigulda (Latvia) at the beginning of January. In the first individual race he had to admit defeat to Latvian Kristers Aparjods, but in the second he catapulted himself up from twelfth place with a brilliant second run. The joy was particularly great because this World Cup race was also counted as the European Championship.
The team from the German Bobsleigh and Sled Association (BSD) showed a strong overall performance in Sigulda, which finally compensated for the unusually weak start to the season in Innsbruck-Igls at the beginning of December (no win in eight races). In the women’s World Cup, Dajana Eitberger (RC Ilmenau) and Julia Taubitz (WSC Erzgebirge Oberwiesenthal) have meanwhile set themselves apart from the competition. Felix Loch (RC Berchtesgaden) is second in the men’s race behind Italy’s Dominik Fischnaller. There is also a German double lead in the men’s doubles World Cup rankings with Tobias Wendl (RC Berchtesgaden) and Tobias Arlt (WSV Königssee) in first place, followed by Toni Eggert (BRC Ilsenburg) and Sascha Benecken (RT Suhl). In the women’s doubles, the 2022 world champions Jessica Degenhardt (RRC Altenberg) and Cheyenne Rosenthal (BSC Winterberg) are third.
In addition to these athletes and Langenhan, European Champion Anna Berreiter (RC Berchtesgarden) is also a hot candidate for a medal at the World Championships in Oberhof. The silver medal winners in the women’s doubles at the 2022 World Championships, Luisa Romanenko and Paulina Patz (both RSV Schmalkalden) cannot compete after Romanenko suffered a serious training injury on the Oberhof track in November. As usual, the strongest competition for the BSD team comes from Austria, Latvia and Italy. It will be exciting to see if they can regain the prestigious title in the team relay, which they lost to Austria at the last World Cup, 0.038 seconds behind.
The BSD team is used to success at world championships, especially when they take place in Germany. Twelve out of a possible 21 medals were won in both 2019 in Winterberg and 2021 in Königssee. Only in Sochi 2020 did you have to tread much more softly with five medals. The host Russian team cleaned up there, although they are not allowed to start at the World Championships in Oberhof due to the war in the Ukraine.
The difficulties that the BSD team had to contend with at the beginning of the season are also related to a change in the regulations decided by the International Luge Federation FIL in the summer of 2022. The sleds must now lie lower, the runners further apart. This should make the sledges safer and increase equal opportunities. In the development of racing sleds, the Germans were far ahead of the competition, not least thanks to the Institute for Research and Development of Sports Equipment (FES) founded in East Germany in 1963. The frustration about the rule changes was great in the DSB. Racing sleds worth 50,000 euros ended up in the trash. The three-time Olympic champion in doubles, Tobias Wendl, showed up in the ARD but understanding: “One of the reasons is that the field is moving closer together, and the effort involved in developing it is no longer quite as expensive, and that makes everything fairer.”
The Luge World Championships are not the only World Championships in Oberhof this year. The Biathlon World Championships will follow from February 8th to 19th. Both events cost the federal, state and local authorities 84 million euros. Part of the money had to be used to fix a leak in the ammonia line needed for freezing the artificial ice rink in the fall. However, the organizers are now talking about the “best possible conditions” that the athletes expect. Only the wintry ambience is still missing in Oberhof, but that is now missing in almost all winter sports resorts.
