Vanessa Voigt after hate comments – “You don’t run slowly on purpose”

The life of a competitive athlete is characterized by pressure. On the one hand, there is the pressure to be successful in sport and to achieve your own goals. In the age of social media, however, external pressure is becoming more and more common. Biathlete Vanessa Voigt reports in the Sportschau winter sports podcast how she deals with it and why she switches off her cell phone after less successful races.

It was an emotional ARD interview from Vanessa Voigt after her 15th place in the pursuit. “Of course, that’s not the performance you want to achieve. That is, very hard“, confessed the 26-year-old: “I really had to fight back tears because you work your ass off all year long – and then something like that comes to a climax.She announced that she would first turn off her cell phone in the hotel.

In the Sportschau winter sports podcast, which will be released on Monday (February 12, 2024), she talks the day after about the mental challenges of being an athlete.

Personally offensive comments against Voigt

The performance in the past few weeks “just didn’t fit“Voigt is self-critical. Instead of receiving encouraging words from her followers, she was exposed to many nasty comments.”You often found news that was really frightening and personally insulting“, reports Voigt.

“The World Cup hasn’t gone so well so far“, admits the 26-year-old, but would like more support: “All I really need right now is a hug and a few kind words and definitely no news that might bring me even further down to earth. Yesterday I was pretty down on the ground.“

Voigt welcomes objective criticism

Comments like “you are mentally weak. You should please go home. What are you still doing here?” can be found regularly in her posts. She welcomes objective criticism, emphasizes Voigt.

But “where people who are sitting on the couch in front of the TV and have perhaps never been on skis themselves simply give their criticism, even though they personally only see me at the biathlon race and have no idea how crazy my setup is around it what I do mentally“, find her “pretty weak“, says the second best German biathlete.

Voigt publishes hate comments

The athlete from WSV Rotterode has been dealing with the topic of hate comments on the internet for a long time. She has published some of them in the past. She wanted to show “what kind of news we get, what we are confronted with“, explains Voigt in the podcast.

She wishes, “that the criticism is a bit more objective” is and points out: “You don’t do it on purpose. You don’t run slowly on purpose. You always do your best, regardless of whether the shooting result wasn’t great today or whether the material wasn’t great. It’s a starting line. It’s a finish line and between the two you try to give 100 percent.”

After posting about the hate comments, she received a lot of support from ex-professionals. The most common advice: to simply ignore the comments and not even read them. “Even though I probably shouldn’t watch it, you can still see it.“

Roommate Grotian as mental support

In order to better deal with the pressure, Voigt got a mental trainer at her side. That was the result of an analysis of the messed up past World Cup. Her roommate Selina Grotian also helps her and always has an open ear. Yesterday the young biathlete waited for Voigt with hot chocolate.

And if none of that helps, crying and showing emotions are also a good remedy, says Voigt. “Always building this wall is not good either.“