Salt Lake City. The women’s luge race of the XIX. Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City ended with a triple victory for the German team. After four runs, a crowd of again 14,000 spectators at Utah Olympic Park cheered at the two-time World Champion Sylke Otto from Oberwiesenthal. With a time of 2:52.464 minutes the 31 year-old European Champion realized her up to now biggest success. The silver medal went to Barbara Niedernhuber, the 1998 Olympic silver medalist from Koenigssee, Germany (2:52.785). Silke Kraushaar (2:52.865) from Oberhof, Germany captured the bronze medal.

For the first time after the Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, Canada, all medals in the competition went to one single country. 14 years ago Steffi Martin-Walter, Ute Oberhoffner and Cerstin Schmidt had won all three medals for the former German Democratic Republic at Canada Olympic Park.

Ranks four and five went to Austria’s Angelika Neuner (2:54.162) and Becky Wilczak (2:54.254) from the USA.

Sylke Otto started the Olympic race suffering a painful stiff neck, but led by a small margin after two runs. “I will lose one or two hundredths of a second at the start, but I can catch up during my run”, said the 2000 and 2001 World Champion before the two final runs.

After two runs, Germany’s Barbara Niedernhuber thanked Georg Hackl for his assistance. The best luger of all times, who had been the first winter sports athlete to ever have won five consecutive medals (gold: 1992, 1994, 1998, silver: 1988 and 2002), had built a sled for his teammate in the past few weeks. “Schorsch has helped me so much, without him I would not even have qualified for Salt Lake City”, said the bronze medallist at the 2001 World Championships.

During the second run, Silke Kraushaar almost gave away all chances for a victory. “I made a mistake at the exit of curve 14, which has never happened to me before”, complained the deputy World Champion after the run. “However, I have always said that I do not care about the color of the medal. The main thing is to get any medal at all. I have had the medal everybody is fighting for at home for four years now.”