On Friday, one of the biggest hopes of Czech biathlon will experience its big home premiere. Tereza Voborníková will perform in Nové Město na Morava for the first time in her career as part of the World Cup and will want to follow up on the world championship. In Oberhof, Germany, she showed that she can soon be among the best.
In 2012, Gabriela Koukalová conquered the world of biathlon. She was twenty-three. In 2019, Markéta Davidová appeared on the podium for the first time. At twenty-two.
That’s how much Tereza Voborníková is now, a biathlete whose bright future experts have been predicting for years.
The medalist from the juvenile and junior categories is already starting to attack the adult elite, at the recent world championships in Oberhof she had her first glimpse into the elite ten: she took a great seventh place in the pursuit race.
She was not predestined for biathlon, she had to find it mainly thanks to the Czech biathlon boom of the last decade, represented by Gabriela Soukalová, Ondřej Moravec, Michal Šlesingr, Jaroslav Soukup and Veronika Vítková.
The girl from Hostinné in the Krkonoše Mountains first devoted herself to ballet in her childhood. At first she loved him, but soon she felt too tied to him.
“Even then, posture and grace in every movement were absolutely essential. But I was more the girl who wanted to rest and go for a little run in nature. A little later, I joined the running club in Vrchlabí, and I and my ballet teacher we concluded that gracefulness is gone forever,” Voborníková said recently.
She got into biathlon later than other children, only at the age of thirteen. It was immediately obvious that the club in Jilemnice, where she sometimes traveled tens of kilometers from Hostinné by bicycle for training, would grow a significant talent.
The coach there, Tomáš Holubec, was enchanted from the beginning by what a fighter Voborníková is.
She beat the more talented ones with willpower. She didn’t do sports because her parents forced her to, but because she wanted to.
“Tereza equals a great hard worker. She always fulfills what she is prescribed to the letter and often adds something extra,” he described the rising star years ago, when she won a medal at the Junior World Championships.
He described her as a more closed-off personality who can be self-sufficient and has a strong sense of purpose.
“She is very mature. She thinks a lot about what, how and why she does. She is meticulous, her training diary is always in order and filled in on time,” added Holubec at the time.
After the juvenile category, she made a significant impact in the junior championship as well. A year ago in American Soldier Hollow, she won two gold and one bronze. A few days before her success, the war started, a young Czech woman came to the ceremony with a banner “Pray for Ukraine”.
The organizers refused to take her photo, which Voborníková complained about on the networks. “It’s sad that they refused to take a picture of me with this message,” she wrote, and the International Biathlon Union was quick to issue an apology.
She had already participated in the Olympic Games in Beijing, and was definitely ranked among the adults before the current season. So far, its rise is gradual, but it is proceeding according to plan.
In the Vysočina arena, a lover of sweets and film horrors is waiting for a premiere. Complete. She was never even a fan at the World Cup.
The daily Aktuálně.cz will follow the Friday afternoon sprint in an online report.
In NMNM, Tereza Voborníková reveals what she always carries with her:
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