Kira Walkenhorst has won all relevant international and national beach volleyball titles in her career and thus made sports history.
The 2016 Olympic champion and 2017 World and European champion in 2013 and 2015 was repeatedly set back by persistent injuries and fought her way back into the sand each time with her irrepressible will. The exceptional athlete had to endure an unbelievable ten operations. Cruciate ligament, meniscus, shoulder, medial ligament and hip surgeries, followed by mononucleosis, set her back again and again. Again and again a career end threatened, but Kira did not give up. She spent countless months in physiotherapy, only to end up back in top shape on time for the season highlights and walk off the court as a winner. In the fall of 2018, the trained physiotherapist and sports soldier became a mother of triplets together with her wife Maria, who are Kira’s pride and joy.
Kira Walkenhorst Lecture Topic:
- Stand up – Pursue your goals!
In the spring of 2019, she again had to take a break due to injury, which also led to the separation of the “Golden Girlz” Ludwig-Walkenhorst due to the upcoming Olympic qualification. At this point, Kira could no longer even take a coffee cup from the shelf. Her pain was too severe. On the recommendation of her new manager Marc Stöckel, she went to a holistic treatment with an alternative practitioner in the spring of 2019, who completely treated Kira within half a year, so that she could play beach volleyball again in late summer 2019.
After the two-year corona restrictions for top athletes*, she officially celebrated her comeback on the German Beach Tour in 2022. In the process, she won the tournaments in Hamburg and Bremen as well as the bronze medal at the German Championships on Timmendorfer Strand and was also named “Best Attacker,” “Best Serve Player,” “Best Team” and “Most valuable Player” on the German Beach Tour.
In addition to her career as a professional beach volleyball player, Kira is a sought-after talk guest and speaker on the topics of “Motivation”, “Diversity” and “LGBTQ” at large corporations and medium-sized companies. Her keynote speech “Stand up – Pursue your goals!” uses her own life story to describe the extremely rocky road with all the ups and downs of one of the best beach volleyball players in the world to Olympic gold.