DShe will always feel a “thorn”. Kim Kalicki is sure of that. At the Olympic Games in Beijing a year ago, the bobsleigh pilot slipped past the podium in fourth place, although she was one of the favorites as she was second in the World Championships twice and had two World Cup successes. Talking for a long time about possible reasons for this does not suit the 25-year-old from Wiesbaden. “I just drove badly,” she states curtly.
Getting up, attacking again, always giving everything and adding up at the end, this attitude characterizes the Hessian. Going crazy, says Kalicki, “just takes energy.” She is also showing this attitude in the current situation: After a strong start to the season overseas, where she won twice with her brake ladies Anabel Galander and Leonie Fiebig and finished third, last year’s third place starts as the leader in the World Cup at the first home race Pretty bad weekend in Winterberg.
“I was completely flat at home between the years,” says Kalicki. She is currently only at “80 percent” of her strength. “We’ll do our best and then I hope I don’t get worse afterwards.”
Kalicki has changed the training
At the end of the month, the World Championships will take place in St. Moritz. At the highlight of the season, Kalicki wants to build on her two previous silver medals. She changed her training in the summer and moved back to Wiesbaden with her friend and sports colleague Costa Laurenz after two years in Halle. The plans for the daily drudgery are now being written by the former bobsledder and athletics coach Thomas Prange in Paderborn, the coach of the top German sprinter Tatjana Pinto.
Kalicki reveals that he adapts this very individually to her. The program at the base in Saxony-Anhalt “didn’t suit her”. Although she is athletically strong, she was no longer able to get on the track. Now their start times are again among the best in the field.
Knows about the monobob, but still has room for improvement: Kim Kalicki
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Image: dpa
The Olympic squad athlete has remained true to her club TuS Eintracht Wiesbaden instead of moving to the SGE in Frankfurt with her former club colleagues and bobsleigh national coach Tim Restle. “I’ve been at the club for so long,” she says. When the others “escaped almost overnight”, she sat down with the board and developed a project that should not only help her as a role model.
“After the corona pandemic, children’s athletics in the club fell asleep,” says Kalicki. She herself is now involved as a youth trainer in the sport in which the foundations for successful bobsleigh careers are laid. At the same time, work is being done to create a pool of sponsors and to improve the training conditions. The new hall on Wettinerstraße should be available from May. The inspector completes her strength training with the police, where she volunteers for three months on patrol duty in the spring. “It’s very hard sometimes,” she says. But she doesn’t want to lose touch with a view to her career after sport.
Kalicki is not as successful as a soloist as she is in a team of two. In the monobob, with which the bobsleigh competitions also begin on Saturday in Sauerland, she has never made it onto the podium in the World Cup. “I’m still too light for that,” says the 75-kilo athlete. To compensate for the weight, she has to push a sled that weighs 173 kilograms and is heavier than her duo, who weighs 170.5. “I need to eat more,” says Kalicki. But at 1.75 meters, she is a bit too small for her discipline. “And in winter we travel so much that I can’t do it anyway.”
