Julia Taubitz: What Comes After the Goal Is Reached?
There is a sentence you do not often hear from Olympic champions with quite this clarity. "My career is complete," says Julia Taubitz. "A World Championship title, the overall World Cup, Olympic gold – those were my three great goals, and in purely sporting terms I have achieved what I set out to achieve. That gives me an absolute inner peace."
It is the sentence of a woman who has nothing left to prove – to herself or to anyone else. And that is precisely what makes the coming season one of the most interesting of her career – not because she still has to chase something down at all costs, but because for the first time in fifteen years she can slide without an overriding objective.
Four Years for One Moment
To understand what that means, you have to go back (at least) four years. Beijing 2022 was a crash landing – the exact opposite of what would follow one Olympiad later. "After the disappointment of Beijing, I focused entirely on Cortina," says Taubitz. "Four years of training for that one single goal. Everything I won along the way was simply a means of preparing myself for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games." Individual World Cup victories, European and World Championship gold medals, overall World Cup titles season after season – all welcome side effects.
It was a preparation that went far beyond the track. From May 2022, she worked systematically with a mental coach. "I am actually strong in competition, and before the Games in China I was more worried that I might overthink things. After Beijing I realised I needed to address that side of things too." She describes those years cinematically: "I was living in my own film."
The Script Ends – What Comes Next?
On the day the Olympic luge competitions were over and Taubitz's film was in the can with two gold medals, the real story begins. A film that had a clear ending has been shot. And nobody told her what happens afterwards.
"Mentally, I was overwhelmed after Cortina," she says openly. "My everyday life is different now from what it has been for the last 15 years. It is no longer the eternal 'Groundhog Day' – I find myself somewhere else too often. So many people want something from you, and you yourself have not yet properly processed what actually happened. That is why it is important to find the balance again in this post-Olympic depression."
The calendar that was once governed by training schedules is now full of additional commitments. Official honours, the award of Saxony's Sportswoman of the Year 2025, the Silver Laurel Leaf presented to her in Berlin on 22 June, media requests, talk shows, corporate events, autograph sessions – around 30 engagements between March and May alone. One of the most significant came in June: the honorary citizenship of her home city of Annaberg-Buchholz, as the youngest recipient in the city's almost 190-year history and its first woman ever. "I did not know that beforehand. It honours me deeply."
"There are weeks when there is nothing at all, and then there are days with three appointments one after another," Taubitz describes the rhythm. "That has created a healthy tension – sometimes I have to turn down engagements to make time for myself and for the sport." And yet she adds with gratitude: "The attention makes up for the work you put in throughout the year."
A Season Without a Script
Even though the great goals have been reached, the fire for the sport has not gone out. After her golden Olympic moments, Taubitz won the overall World Cup for the fifth consecutive time – in Altenberg of all places, the very track where she first learned to luge. "Can it get any better than this?" she asks herself. "Should I just leave it here?" And then she immediately answers her own questions: "It is not yet time to hang up the sled."
So what is the plan when there is no longer a grand plan? "I want to enjoy everything now," she says. "Maybe 2026/27 will be the farewell tour. But I am not done – I cannot say whether it will be one more year or two or four." Whether she will be at La Plagne in 2030, Taubitz deliberately leaves open. It is an unfamiliar position for an athlete who has spent her entire career homing in on a goal – suddenly just sliding because it still brings her joy.
Off the track too, her life is increasingly taking shape. Taubitz is studying Sport Business Management with a focus on communications. "I want to stay in sport, work operationally, be active at the interface between athletes, sponsors, stakeholders and communications."
Until November, the official ambassador of the Erzgebirge region wants above all one thing: to find a rhythm that feels normal again. In two weeks' time, the first starting technique training camp begins. In July comes a two-and-a-half-week holiday in Panama, after which the routine of training and student life is set to fall into place.
What the future really holds, perhaps not even Julia Taubitz herself knows. And if she does, she is keeping it to herself for now. But one thing becomes clear: this script may have been written and this film may have been shot – but Taubitz is exactly the kind of person who has already started work on a sequel.
We are entitled to be curious.
