Cycling:”Completely finished”: Vogel makes history with eleventh gold medal at the World Championships for track cycling

Kristina Vogel sank panting to the ground,”I’m completely exhausted,”gasped the two-time Olympic track cycling champion after her second gold medal at the World Championships in Apeldoorn.

Then she slipped down the track and celebrated her historic success with her team mate from Erfurt, Pauline Grabosch, and a German flag in her hand.

The 27-year-old had defeated the Australian vice world champion Stephanie Morton 2:1 in the sprint and thus won her eleventh overall World Championship title. Previously, only the Australian Anna Meares had succeeded in doing so.

“Today I don’t count. It was so hard, I had to give everything. I’m just proud to have won this one title,”said Vogel. In the semi-final, she had defeated the 20-year-old Grabosch 2:0. Grabosch then won 2-0 against Hong Kong’s Wai Sze Lee and won her first World Cup medal in a single discipline with a bronze medal.

Unlike in the team sprint, which she won on Wednesday with her permanent partner Miriam Welte, Vogel had also been the big favourite in the individual sprint beforehand. This season she was a class of her own in her showpiece discipline, winning every World Cup race she competed in. Since the 2016 World Cup semi-final, Vogel has been unbeaten on the short distance.

One might think that the bird shakes all this out of the hand. But it’s not like that,”she said to her three competitions in the Netherlands. On Sunday, Vogel can crown herself in Keirin to become the only number one track cyclist. But she didn’t want to think about that on Friday:”I wanted three medals, one of them gold. I already have two. But now I have to recharge the batteries.”

Already in the afternoon Maximilian Levy (Cottbus) had qualified surprisingly for the quarter-finals of the men’s sprint on Saturday. The bronze medallist of the previous day’s Keirin race defeated first qualifier Jeffrey Hoogland from the Netherlands in the last sixteen.

“I guess I didn’t feel like taking a vacation. I’m like old wine, even though I’m most likely not to win the sprint world championship any more. But it may happen once or twice in your career that you are 16th birthday. The 30-year-old said,”I still have nothing to lose,” and he said:”I still have nothing to lose. In the women’s Omnium, the Munich-based Gudrun Stock finished eleventh.

The third day in Apeldoorn was overshadowed by a serious accident. A referee of the World Cycling Federation UCI collided with a female cyclist during the Scratch race during the women’s émnium and was then admitted to hospital with head injuries. According to the UCI announcement on Friday evening, however, the official is in stable condition and will continue to be monitored overnight.

UCI official Andrew McCord from the USA wanted to pick up a visor lying on the track and collided with Hong Kong driver Xiaojuan Diao, who was travelling at about 50 kilometres per hour. McCord was treated on the track for about 15 minutes and then unconsciously and was carried away with a stretcher, bleeding at the head. Xiaojuan was taken out of the hall in a wheelchair.