Preuss back in old form after horror season?
Biathlete would be "happy" with one thing
Created: 10/13/2022, 3:40 p.m
By: Patrick Reichelt
Always smiling, but always focused in competition: Franziska Preuss.
© Laci Perenyi/Imago
One of Germany's best biathletes experienced a season to forget last winter.
Now Franziska Preuss is attacking again - recovered, with a new DSV trainer.
Munich – The event of the summer took place away from the public for Franziska Preuss.
Together with partner Simon Schempp, the 28-year-old biathlete is building her home in Ruhpolding.
The wooden house has been there for quite some time, just a few more details on the inside, then nothing stands in the way of moving in.
And then Preuss has him, the perfect place to retreat, which the former resident of The Hague could have needed only too well, especially last year.
In a season where everything that can go wrong went wrong.
Illness and injury accompanied her from month to month.
She caught the corona virus twice alone.
Not to mention the mishap in December at the World Cup in France when she slipped and twisted her ankle on the hotel steps.
In the meantime, Preuss also takes it with humor.
"I bought new, better slippers so that doesn't happen to me anymore," she said with a big grin.
Biathlete Franziska Preuss: Has the happy nature from Bavaria overcome her bad luck?
That certainly goes well with the cheerful Bavarian nature with the Chaplin motto "A day without a smile is a day wasted".
And yet the bad luck of the past season is still deep.
The fear of the next mishap, of the next infection is a constant companion.
"Because it was just so blatant," she said herself."
Perhaps it took a drastic change at the German Ski Association (DSV) to get the woman, who is always healthy and a potential podium runner, on the right track.
The DSV rebuilt its coaching staff.
Since the spring, the Norwegian Sverre Olsbu-Röjseland, husband of the Norwegian high-flyer Marte Olsbu-Röjseland, has been taking on the daily work with the German women.
And the quiet Scandinavian hit the right note with Franziska Preuss right from the start.
"Especially when my health wasn't going so well at the beginning, he talked to me a lot and told me that there was no reason to worry at all," said Preuss.
And the message got through.
"He's doing really well, I'm absolutely thrilled," she enthused.
Especially since the customs officer has actually experienced a largely smooth summer so far.
In the summer of 2022, Franzi Preuss enjoyed her compulsory break on Sylt.
The DSV biathlete struggled with health problems.
© Screenshot Instagram
Biathlon: Preuss hopes for a healthy 2022 season - "everything else will come by itself"
And even if the preparation phase up to the first World Cup at the end of November will still take a while - hope is growing that Franziska Preuss will soon be able to pick up where she left off in 2021, when she won the overall World Cup (3rd) and in the individual classifications of the pursuit (3rd) and their specialty mass start (2nd) reached the podium.
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Which would be a good thing, after all, there is also a home World Cup in Oberhof this season.
But the woman, who once came to ski hunting through legend Fritz Fischer's taster biathlon, prefers not to deal with major sporting goals for the time being.
"I would be happy if I experienced a healthy season again," she said, "everything else will come by itself."
Maybe even her second win in an individual competition.
She experienced the first in January 2019.
In the mass start, at home in Ruhpolding.
Right there, where the common house with partner and ex-biathlete Simon Schempp is now.
You could see that as a pretty good omen.