“Full throttle at the start, full throttle on the track” – with this intention Kim Kalicki is approaching the start of the World Cup for women bobsledders this weekend in the French winter sports resort of La Plagne. For the first time, the woman from Wiesbaden is starting a season as world champion. “Nothing has changed,” as the 26-year-old emphasizes. The search for sponsors hasn’t really become any easier in her fringe sport. She has been able to gain “two to three more supporters” in the past few months.
Kalicki is well protected as an officer in the sports promotion group of the Hessian police. But as a pilot, she says she also has to finance some of the equipment. To start over, she bought better runners, which cost around 8,500 euros. Last year she was “not so fast” on the sled. The fact that at the World Championships in St. Moritz it was still enough to reach the top in a pair with pusher Leonie Fiebig was more due to other qualities, such as one’s own speed, athleticism or the sensitive handling of the steering cables.
The defending champion’s focus is once again on the World Cup, which is coming up in Winterberg in February. The World Cup, in which Kalicki recently took second place overall, demonstrated consistency, “but a World Cup is a World Cup,” she says. And this time, on the home track so to speak, a larger circle of family members and friends could also watch.
At the German championships at the same location in mid-November, Kalicki only competed in the monobob and came fourth. While she was suffering from knee problems, which she declined to go into when asked, her trusted pushers were battling illnesses. Fiebig had just recovered from food poisoning, Anabel Galander left the Sauerland early due to health reasons.
Training conditions a “catastrophe”
In other respects, Kalicki’s preparation for competing against the international competition was not a good one. The conditions that she and her boyfriend Costa Laurenz recently had to cope with in the Hesse state capital were a “catastrophe”. The two form a training group on their own and have not moved to Eintracht in Frankfurt like many of their former colleagues. Kalicki wanted to remain loyal to her long-standing club TuS Eintracht Wiesbaden. The duo got their plans written by former bobsledder and athletics coach Thomas Prange, the coach of top German sprinter Tatjana Pinto. But the implementation is usually left to the two of them themselves.
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According to Kalicki, the athletics hall in which they usually do their running sessions has not been available for four months due to water damage, and the planned new building on Wettinerstrasse, which was supposed to be completed in May, is not yet finished. The inspector completes her strength training sessions with the police, but she and Laurenz had to rely on alternatives for the sprints. “There is no other hall with a tartan track in Wiesbaden,” explains Kalicki.
After the difficult preparation for the season, Kalicki doesn’t really know where she stands. In any case, the opponents in their own camp, with Olympic champion Laura Nolte, who is training in Frankfurt, at the forefront, are giving them additional motivation. At the international level, probably the toughest competitor is missing this time: three-time Olympic gold medalist Kaillie Humphries from the USA is sitting out for a year due to pregnancy. But although the Germans will dominate the business at will after the paper form, Kalicki warns: “It’s all starting all over again now.” Even as world champions, you have to prove yourself again and again. That’s why the only thing that helps is: full throttle.
