Otto Bock Honours Disabled Athletes of the Year

The new disabled athletes of the year are Michael Teuber, Andrea Rothfuss and the members of the National Wheelchair Curling Team. An awards ceremony was held for them on November 12 as the high point of the "Night of the Stars", the gala of the "Förderkreis Behindertensport" (a fundraising group to support sports for the disabled) at the Hotel Maritim in Berlin.

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Otto Bock Honours Disabled Athletes of the Year.

The winners, who were selected by a telephone and online vote after the presentation on the ARD and ZDF morning show from November 9 to 11, 2009, received their awards from Friedhelm Julius Beucher, President of the DBS and Professor Hans Georg Näder, chairman and CEO of Otto Bock HealthCare. Otto Bock has been sponsoring this award for many years.

"We are not so much a classic sponsor of Paralympic sports as a permanent fixture," Professor Näder said, looking back over more than two decades of sports sponsorship by the medical technology company. The male 2009 Disabled Athlete of the Year is racing cyclist Michael Teuber for the second time after being selected in 2005. In September he won gold and silver at the Road World Championships as well as two gold medals at the Track World Championships in Manchester, one of them in world record time.

The female 2009 Disabled Athlete of the Year is 20-year-old ski talent Andrea Rothfuss who won gold at the World Championships with her team. As the "fledgling" of the German team in Turin, she won silver in the giant slalom in 2004 and is one of the medal favourites at the 2010 Paralympics in Vancouver.
As Team of the Year 2009, the National Wheelchair Curling Team took bronze at the World Championships in Vancouver. Wheelchair curling has only been a Paralympic sport since 2006.

Holger Willuhn, Ronny Ziesmer, Elisabeth zu Waldburg-Wolfegg and Waldsee, BVR-President Uwe Fröhlich.

The speech was given by Willi Lemke in his capacity as special sports advisor to the United Nations. "I am inspired by the genuine joy and passion of the athletes, who are not first and foremost looking for contracts or money," is how Lemke described his personal impression of the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. The media awards sponsored by the German Statutory Accident Insurance went to the Reinberg city desk of the "Neue Rhein Zeitung" newpaper, to Martin Zimmermann for the radio interview with Ronny Ziesmar on RBB and to brandstage.tv for the video report on ParalympicSport.tv.

The special "Le Mobile" award sponsored by the Bundesverband der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken (BVR) was presented to the KiOly Initiative by Holger Willuhn, CEO of the Volksbank Eichsfeld-Northeim. KiOly stands for the integractive children's olympics held in Bad Waldsee in 2009 and will bring together children with and without disabilities in Bonn in 2011. The laudation was held by Ronny Ziesmer. Five years ago, the gymnast suffered a serious accident while training. Now his sports objective is to compete in the 2012 Paralympics in London with the hand bike.