Vanessa Mark’s birthday wish didn’t stay secret for long. While the bobsleigh athlete, who had just turned 28, kept her thoughts to herself as she blew out the candles on her surprise cake on Saturday morning, she was able to chat openly about it just a few hours later. The dream of the winter sports athlete from Eintracht Frankfurt had come true: together with pilot Lisa Buckwitz, the pusher raced to gold in a two-man sled at the World Championships in Winterberg.
As was the case at the World Cup in Innsbruck in mid-December, the Olympic champions Laura Nolte and Deborah Levi, who are also based in the big city on the Main, and the defending champion Kim Kalicki from Wiesbaden with her co-driver Leonie Fiebig, were left behind in second and third place, although both duos were able to improve the track record .
Strong-nerved girlfriend
“I still can’t believe it,” Mark said Sunday. Her voice sounded groggy; the spirited athlete had repeatedly shouted her joy after her triumph in the highly exciting three-way battle. After the second of four runs, she and Buckwitz from Potsdam, who had won bronze in the monobob a week earlier, had taken the top position and defended it until the end with a lead of five hundredths of a second.
Her friend’s strong nerves on the steering cables were the decisive factor, explained Mark. The distances are “just a blink of an eye”.
The Dortmund native has not had an easy journey. For the 2015/16 season, the former heptathlete switched from the track to the ice rink, but she couldn’t really get going there. Their current coach, Tim Restle, who had founded a bobsleigh group as an athletics coach at TuS Eintracht Wiesbaden, believed in their potential, and so Mark moved to the Hesse state capital.
In the sled of the now retired Olympic champion Mariama Jamanka, she achieved her first World Cup successes four years ago and finished her World Cup debut in 2021 in Altenberg in sixth place. A foot injury prevented the possible Olympic start in Beijing 2022; Mark was also diagnosed with gout, which she now has under control by changing her diet.
“Cool and casual”
The current season is the first for which the administrative assistant was able to prepare without any problems. In the meantime only a member of the so-called supplementary squad, Mark had to get permission to join Buckwitz in two push tests in Magdeburg and Oberhof with strong performances.
The two got to know each other well during their time together as pushers on Team Jamanka. “Lisa is pretty cool and laid-back,” says Mark, while looking at various videos on social media, you could characterize her as an energetic jokester.
Restle’s training group slipped under the Eintracht umbrella in 2022 and trains in the summer months at the athletics facility on Hahnstrasse, where a push track for the bobsleigh specialists will also be built in the foreseeable future. Mark praises the “support” she feels in the large club. Now she has secured the SGE’s first world championship title among those active in what is still a young sport there. Club colleague Issam Ammour won World Cup bronze in a pair with his brother Adam.
Anno Hecker, Winterberg Published/Updated: Recommendations: 1 A comment from Christoph Becker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 7 Published/Updated: Recommendations: 1
Unlike in the World Cup, all three German women’s teams drove the same sled, which facilitated the close race. Attempts to curb the dominance of the World Cup hosts through rule changes at the international level have had little effect. Mark is proud to be in the bobsleigh for her nation. But the daughter of a German mother and an African father also feels connected to her father’s homeland. “When I compete,” she reveals, “I always wear Ghana socks.”
