Luger Natalie Geisenberger resigns: At the place in the sun – Sport

Sitting at work is not safe. Many office workers suffer because their backs are not resilient, they tend to slouch, or the expensive chair is poorly adjusted.

Natalie Geisenberger’s workplace was the toboggan run for roughly a decade and a half. She also had a chair, only it looked different. Instead of a seat cushion, she sat on a special shell; instead of four wooden legs, two razor-sharp runners gave the seating system support. Geisenberger’s vehicle shot through an ice track at up to 130 km/h, with her on top during training in the summer, in the World Cup in the winter, at the World Cup and at the Olympics.

This lasted roughly 15 years. Now Geisenberger, 35, has announced her retirement from competitive sports, and that probably has to do with back pain, among other things, but also with many other reasons. “It’s mainly the back that hurts when sledding,” Geisenberger once explained, “it affects the body, it affects the psyche, it’s just exhausting.”

Geisenberger was on the hunt for the round plaques, but she was also interested in the community

That was at the peak of her career, before the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Today she no longer has to prove anything to anyone. Geisenberger, who was basically motivated by the fun of the track rhythm, the rush of speed and of course the feeling of victory, has come a long way: she is the most successful German winter athlete at the Olympic Games, and therefore also one of the Greatest at World Championships: Listing your successes, victories and medals one by one takes almost as long as it takes from the start to the finish of a toboggan run. Seven Olympic plaques, first one bronze and then six gold medals in a row in four trips to the Games from Vancouver 2010 to Beijing 2022. She won her first World Cup medal in 2008 in Oberhof (silver), her last on the track in Königssee (2021), overall 16 pieces, including nine gold ones.

Such medal lists are abstract, but for a top athlete each one is associated with a special memory. One is stronger, the other weaker, her first individual World Championship medals – silver in 2009 in Lake Placid and the first World Championship victory in Whistler – are likely to represent such notches in the memory. Geisenberger was on the hunt for these round plaques for an entire career, but she was also concerned with something completely different: the atmosphere at work, the community, even if she first had to win a duel with her colleague Tatjana Hüfner, who had been equally strong for a long time. And, of course: it was about nature, at home in Miesbach and training at Königssee, about the mountains, the forests and the summer training on the train, the time of good weather.

The Berchtesgaden tobogganers called themselves the “Sunshine Training Group” – in addition to Geisenberger, there was Felix Loch, the other exceptional individual athlete, as well as Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt, also known as “the two Tobis” or “Wendlarlt”, and Georg Hackl, the tobogganing crack of the previous generation , who prepared the material. Sunshine was the name of this team in the national team – it sounded a bit exaggerated, like a good mood, like a carefree athlete’s life, also like a bit of Bavarian Mia-san-Mia, and definitely like a very slight feeling of superiority, because this group was supposedly always beaming Sun. But what can you say? It was like that.

She could probably still keep up – but for what purpose?

This group was also successful in the dark winter, when the sun, if it appeared at all, only warmed people’s backs for a few hours at most – even those who named their group after it. But Geisenberger always had enough preparation, enough strength at the start, and when she turned 30, also enough technique and experience. For example, for the passage between turns nine and twelve in Pyeongchang 2018. The track architects and designers had exhausted everything that makes bobsleigh and toboggan sports look fast. The tobogganers were a little more stable, but the top favorite Geisenberger also had respect for this combination, in which she too could lose everything. It’s not like luge series champions can never lose. A wrong twitch of the foot when steering, a curve that’s slightly too late, and the sledder scrapes the upper barrier at the exit of a steep curve instead of riding on the ideal line to victory.

But Geisenberger had done everything right. It was the time when the competition was relying on the weaknesses of the older tobogganer. But, like all the years before and the five years after, she had now implemented everything necessary in Pyeongchang. She held the line at the exit of the nine and ten, avoided jumping too far over the threshold of the eleven and disappeared again towards the goal of the next Olympic gold medal.

She could probably still keep up, but for what? Geisenberger has stopped competing in high-performance sports; she no longer needs training or back pain. She has a family where you get enough work, even without daily training, but also enough sunshine.