Kristina Vogel

Kristina Vogel(born 10 November 1990) is a German former track cyclist. During her career, she won two gold medals and a bronze at the Olympic Games, and is an eleven-time UCI World Champion. She was paralysed following a crash in June 2018.

Vogel was born in Leninskoye, a district of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and moved to Germany with her parents when she was six months old. In 2007 and 2008 she competed at the Junior European and World Championships and became a six-time junior world champion and two-time junior European champion.

In April 2009, Vogel was seriously injured after a collision with a minibus when riding on the roads near her home in Erfurt. She was in an artificial coma for two days. She competed at the 2010 UCI Track Cycling World Championships, where she finished fifth in the individual sprint and sixth in the team sprint alongside Miriam Welte. She also competed at the 2011 UCI Track Cycling World Championships.

At the 2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Melbourne, Vogel and Welte won the gold medal in the team sprint. They set a world record in qualifying which they broke again in the final. Vogel and Welte would go on to win the first ever Olympic gold medal in women's team sprint later that year in London, benefiting from competitors being relegated in both the semifinal and final.

On 26 June 2018, in the Cottbus velodrome, Vogel collided while at full speed with a Dutch junior cyclist who was practising a standing start. In her own words, "There where I was and where he stood was not even two meters. I must have come to a complete stop in an instant." The immediate crash on the concrete floor caused several fractures but in particular severed her spinal cord at the seventh thoracic vertebrae and consequently caused paraplegia. Vogel's teammate Maximilian Levy was the first to come to her aid, and following the accident, he and fellow cyclist Max Dörnbach, using the hashtag #staystrongkristina, went on to raise €119,752 for her recovery.

The Dutch cyclist was physically uninjured and received psychological support. Thorwald Veneberg, official of the Dutch Cyclists Union had contacted Vogel's coach but the coach asked to wait. On 7 September 2018, as a result of this accident, Vogel has said that she "can't walk any more" and has to use a wheelchair. In addition to her track cycling career, Vogel was a part-time police officer before her accident.

In 2019, she began a new career in politics, standing for election as a candidate for the CDU in Erfurt city council elections, which will take place in May.