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Johannes Ludwig: Overall World Cup winner and now Olympic champion
Photo:
Robert Michael / dpa
Luge athlete Johannes Ludwig is an Olympic champion.
The 35-year-old won the Winter Games and thus provided the first German gold medal in Beijing.
Four years ago in Pyeongchang, Ludwig had won bronze in the individual competition and gold in the team relay.
The success in Beijing was now the eleventh individual gold by a German luger in Olympic history.
Ludwig prevailed in the Yanqing ice channel with a lead of +0.160 seconds over Austrian Wolfgang Kindl.
Bronze went to the Italian Dominik Fischnaller (+0.951 seconds).
Behind him in fourth place was Felix Loch (+1.143), a second German pilot.
Max Langenhan was sixth.
"I'm kinda pretty happy," said Ludwig on ZDF: "And I'm glad I've stayed on the ball all these years.
I often didn't qualify for the Olympics, I often didn't get a medal at World Championships, but I kept going.
Now I know it was right.”
"We're going to celebrate a little today"
"Hansi fought for so many years," said Loch, "he deserved it so much, we're going to celebrate a bit today." His own fourth place was "bitter, that suits the season, it was a bit difficult.
In the end, after my corona infection in December, I have to be happy that I was there.«
With a lead of 0.113 seconds, Ludwig went into the final in the fourth and last round on the 1583 meter longest track in the world.
In the end, the overall World Cup winner was clearly ahead of Kindl.
In the third run, the man from Oberhof set his own track record down to 57.043 seconds with a consistent and confident ride.
Not even the competitor Kindl, who was tough the day before, could keep up.
Ludwig had already demonstrated his strength on Saturday.
In the very first run he improved the start record of the Russian Semen Pavlitschenko to 2.455 seconds and set a track record of 57.063 seconds at the finish.
At half-time, Ludwig was just 0.039 seconds ahead of Kindl.
The rest of the competition was already left behind.
With his second Olympic victory, Ludwig is one of a number of great German lugers.
In Innsbruck in 1964, Thomas Köhler became the first ever Olympic luge champion, while Wolfgang Scheidel won the individual gold medal in Sapporo in 1972.
Four years later Dettlef Günther also won in singles.
Bernhard Glass made it in Lake Placid in 1980, and Jens Müller raced to the Olympic throne in Calgary in 1988.
Georg Hackl won three gold medals in the individual competition.
Then Felix Loch won gold twice in 2010 in Vancouver and in 2014 in Sochi.
bka/mon/dpa