The German Olympic Sports Federation (DOSB) and a 153-strong team will enter the 102 medals of the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang/South Korea (9th place). till 25. February). After the first 43 athletes, the DOSB announced a further 110 participants in the second round of nominations on Tuesday in Frankfurt/Main.
The team consists of 94 men and 59 women. Only in alpine skiing there is still a chance to qualify for the men’s World Cup slalom in Schladming on Tuesday evening.
The DOSB had named the largest squad (161) for the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, and four years ago the German team for Sochi consisted of 153 athletes. For the first time there were more women than men in the squad (77:76). This is no longer the case. Unlike Pyeongchang, the men’s national ice hockey team did not qualify for the Black Sea games, but this time there were no women.
With eight gold medals, six silver medals and five bronze medals, the German Olympic team in Sochi had achieved by far the worst result since reunification. This was a clear failure to meet the target of 30 medals. In South Korea, the DOSB should go in the other direction as far as possible.
“It’s a good mix of experience and Olympic debutants,”said DOSB’s top athlete Dirk Schimmelpfennig, head of the German team’s mission for the first time in South Korea,”the athletes have achieved some outstanding results in this winter season, but we’ve also had a lot of bad luck with injuries”.
But Schimmelpfennig continued:”We are guided by the outcome of Sochi and aim to demonstrate the further development of winter sports in Germany over the last four years.
The team also includes Claudia Pechstein’s partner Matthias Große:”The German Speed Skating Association (DESG) has proposed Matthias Große and we nominated him as a supervisor,” said the new DOSB board chairman Veronika Rücker:”He has gone through the same test procedure as all other supervisors, there were no reasons to come to a different assessment.
The German head of mission, Dirk Schimmelpfennig, stressed that the DOSB is trying to create optimal conditions for its athletes. He assumes, Schimmelpfennig added, that “as a member of the German Olympic team, Große” behaves as professionally on site as the other members do “.
All of the nominated athletes were awarded a “Team D Medal” for their extraordinary achievements. The injured Olympic candidates, such as ski star Felix Neureuther, also received the award:”You will now become a team thumb-printers,”said the new DOSB CEO Veronika Rücker.