“Hope DSV wakes up”
German biathlon talent ends career with a bang
04/08/2023, 05:10 p.m
Luise Müller wins relay silver at the Junior World Championships and is one of the young hopefuls in German biathlon. But now the 22-year-old is ending her career. She connects this with admonishing words to the German Ski Association. There is a lot of approval for that.
“Right on the mark,” writes European champion Lisa Maria Spark. The biathlon colleagues Mareike Braun (“Thank you for hitting the nail on the head”) and Antonia Horn (“100 percent true words”) apparently agree to a large extent, there was Olympic champion and world champion Denise Herrmann-Wick at least a “like” for the post: Luise Müller seems to have hit a nerve with the critical words on Instagram about the end of her career.
“Last season I had a lot of time to reflect,” writes the 22-year-old, who won relay silver at the Junior World Championships 2022 together with Spark, Braun and Johanna Puff, “and I decided to withdraw from the biathlon bubble .” Müller wants to “challenge her mind more and explore more of the world.” Last season she was at the start in the IBU Cup finished in the top ten in the sprint in Pokljuka, Slovenia, in the 2021/22 season she took third place in the overall standings of the IBU Junior Cup. But now the biathlon is over.
Müller connects her farewell to competitive sport with admonishing words to the German Ski Association, the DSV. She hopes “that the DSV will slowly wake up and make the broad promotion of young talent and modern training methods a priority.” Addressed to the athletes, she advises “not just to work through your training plan bluntly”, but instead to acquire “modern knowledge about your body and the training”, because: “The most important trainer is you yourself.” Which sounds a lot like the fact that she didn’t always see this claim fulfilled during her time at DSV.
Müller also thanks her family, the “best club”, SV Grün-Weiß Pirna, and her coaches “Wolle, Arne, Roland, Engei and Ali, who all tried to understand Luise’s constantly questioning nature and to demand”. However, she “unfortunately also met people for whom only athletic performance counts” and not “the person as a personality”. Also coaches “who have a completely distorted picture of training methods and the individuality of athletes”. This suggests that she was unconvinced by generalized and universal approaches and would instead like more individual support.
Nevertheless, Müller says “thank you for every single moment”, and “mainly because of the people I was able to get to know”. Thanks to these people, she was able to hide “the seriousness of life with humor and warmth” again and again: “I hope I’ve sometimes managed to do that the other way around.” The 22-year-old leaves it open in her detailed contribution as to how things will continue, instead simply ending it with the words: “Goodbye.”