The best artistic cyclist in the world came from Germany for many years, more precisely from Ebermannstadt in Upper Franconia. Lukas Kohl, 28, successfully rode a one-man artificial bike for over 20 years, is a seven-time world champion, two-time European champion and eleven-time German champion – and world record holder with 216.40 points awarded by the judges. Kohl continually impressed her with acrobatic and precision exercises on the specially designed art bike that most people couldn’t even do without the bike.
Kohl recently ended his career: “You should stop when you have experienced everything,” he says. And in his opinion he has this – most recently through his participation in the World Cup in Glasgow 2023, an international World Cup and the home World Cup in Bremen in October. Leading up to this World Cup, Kohl had put together an impressive winning streak of 188 wins in eight years. He was now one of the older players in his sport. Although he feels fit and remains largely uninjured, it has become more strenuous for him every year, “because your body needs a millisecond longer to react, and you can’t compensate for this longer reaction time with anything.” He couldn’t combine more training and more regeneration with his full-time job as an industrial engineer.
Until the end of his career, Kohl had to juggle 40 hours of work a week, 25 hours of sport and competitions on the weekends. Now he is ready for new challenges: “My body tells me that you feel like you are 18, and so I now have full power to start the next projects.” It is already clear that in the future he will work as a referee at the Bavarian level as well as a board member at Indoor Cycling Worldwide. The non-profit association is responsible for the artistic cycling world cups and promotes the international development of artistic cycling and cycling as well as new indoor cycling nations.
Kohl did his first laps on an artificial bike at the age of eight after he accidentally came into contact with the sport at a cycling tournament. A few years later he was accepted into the Bavarian state squad and practiced partly in Oberhaching near Munich. Since then, his mother Andrea Kohl, who had previously had nothing to do with artistic cycling, also trained him and acquired the knowledge for him. Together they were able to take part in additional training sessions at the home club RMSV Concordia Kirchehrenbach and celebrate numerous successes.
In the future, he would like his sport to become more accessible
According to Kohl himself, a number of qualities were crucial for these successes. Firstly, discipline, as until recently his life consisted exclusively of his job and sport. On the other hand, strength endurance and mental strength to be able to perform the five-minute freestyle, consisting of 30 exercises. It also requires a lot of reaction speed, body tension and a good deal of courage: “You first have to have the courage to do a handstand on the bike, you have to overcome yourself extremely.” What has made him stand out from these complex challenges over the last eight years What stood out from his fellow campaigners was “transforming perfection into consistency”. And that in important and unimportant competitions. He looked less at the competition as an opponent and more at his bike and gravity. Kohl’s favorite way to challenge gravity was to do the ten-fold twist jump, in which he rotates around the handlebars in a supporting position: “This is the most technically complex and difficult trick that there was and is.”
It’s not unusual for a German to be so dominant in artistic cycling. Before Lukas Kohl, Martin Rominger was world champion seven times and then David Schnabel even eight times. Germany is clearly the leading nation in art cycling. In addition, other European countries such as Switzerland and Spain are successful, although nowhere near to the same extent as Germany. Lukas Kohl thinks that this could be due, among other things, to the fact that artistic cycling is a sport “in which you have to invest a lot of money and at the same time earn nothing.” There are hardly any prizes for competitions or funding. Kohl was one of the lucky few who received basic funding of 300 euros per month from Sporthilfe, which primarily supports Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
Kohl explains that since artistic cycling is not an Olympic sport, it has little chance of receiving more attention and funding: “We don’t have this opportunity to present ourselves in a big way once every four years. Accordingly, we run non-stop under the radar.” For the future, he would like his sport to become more accessible: “So that I have the same opportunities, no matter how I feel at home. That’s not the case in artistic cycling because you have to take care of so many things yourself and pay for them yourself.”
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