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Paraplegic ski jumper Lukas Müller: "Actually, I was lucky"

2020-09-23T15:56:00.555Z


He was considered a great talent in Austrian ski jumping. But in 2016 Lukas Müller fell so badly that he has been in a wheelchair ever since. It was the starting point for a new career.


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Lukas Müller am Kulm 2018. Here he had had a bad fall two years earlier

Photo: 

Jürgen Feichter / imago / Eibner

As a ski jumper, says Lukas Müller, you learn to accept fate.

You train there, summer and winter, subordinate youth and leisure to sport.

And when it comes down to it, you sit on top of the beam with the wind blowing from the wrong side.

A normal ski jumping career is like waiting endlessly for that one moment of fame when the occasion, shape and weather are symbiotic.

It is the moment that most likely never occurs.

"Fate doesn't ask," says Lukas Müller.

That was how it was back then, on January 13th, 2016. The day Müller fell so miserably that he has been dependent on a wheelchair ever since.

Who should destroy his dream of great victories forever.

More than four years later, Müller is sitting in the sky lounge of "Cool Mama", a hotel on Salzburg's motorway belt.

When he's in town, he prefers to come here to eat because it feels "a bit like being on the hill," he says.

Then Müller tells how great it was when he was allowed to stand on the coaching tower in Bischofshofen, Austria this January.

It was the final of the renowned Four Hills Tournament - and Müller, the Austrian, was responsible for the safety of the forerunners at his home competition: if the wind allowed it, he waved them off and sent them off.

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Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2020-09-23

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