Christine Wolf

Christine Wolf was born in a small village near Stuttgart, in southern Germany in 1980. As a 10 year old she was diagnosed with cancer in her leg and spent the following five years in and out of hospitals for chemotherapy and then treating infections. In 1995 her leg was amputated after 11 other operations and five years of trying to save the leg. Her biggest concern in those five years was weather she could ever run again. Her childhood dream of becoming a top level athlete came alive again when she visited the Paralympics in Atlanta in 1996.

In 1997 she first started running with a prosthetic leg. Later she started to train and compete in long jump as well. She then worked towards the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney while finishing school and commencing medicine. Unfortunately, there was no competition for her classification in 2000 but she was a visitor of the games again.

In 2001 she decided to stop studying medicine and she moved to a town called Pforzheim, also called the ‘Golden City of Germany’ because of its jewellery industry, to complete an apprenticeship in gold and silversmithing.

In 2004 she finally got the chance to compete at the Paralympics in long jump, where she won a silver medal. There she met the Australian team and was invited for a three month visit to Canberra. In February 2005, she flew to Australia, where she started to train with Iryna Dvoskina, an AIS Coach. Only a few weeks into the visit she made a life changing decision to move to Australia permanently and compete for Australia in the future.

In September 2005 she packed her belongings including her goldsmith workbench and tools and moved to Canberra. Since then, she’s been living her dream of being a fulltime, elite athlete working hard towards the Paralympics in Beijing in 2008 and enjoying goldsmithing in her free time.