Track bike Olympic champion Miriam Welte has surprisingly announced her immediate retirement just one year before the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. "The last readiness to go completely to the absolute limits, which is simply no longer there," said the 32-year-old of the newspaper "Rheinpfalz". She felt this during the last training sessions. Actually, it was expected that the former team sprint partner of Kristina Vogel will only stop after the Olympics 2020.
Welte made the decision after 13 very successful years in high performance sport. In addition to the Olympic team sprint gold seven years ago in London and Olympic bronze medal 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, the track sprint specialist from Kaiserslautern won six world championship titles and numerous other international medals, a number of them alongside the paralyzed bird since a training accident in the summer of 2018.
The time with Vogel had been "something very special, even if we had phases in which we fought, even with each other," said Welte. The successful duo, named after the triumph in London as the Golden Girls, shaped an era in German track cycling. "We ripped our asses off and did our best to finish on the podium in the end - we were welded together into a team."
Welte renounces by their decision on the track home World Cup next year in Berlin. "I've always said that I want to decide for myself, not someone to vote for me." It also played a role that it would not have been unequivocally clear whether Welte would get a starting place in Tokyo. "Torturing me for a year, to end up being a tourist or not at all, is out of the question for me," she said.