Exclusive interview: Kristina Vogel on life, politics and why she is returning to police work 16 months on from the accident that left her paralysed

Kristina Vogel watches as a young male athlete bench presses what looks to be about twice his own body weight. As he grunts and heaves under the load, she nods approvingly. After he has repeated the exercise a number of times, Vogel says something to him and he gets up and moves on to his next apparatus. The double Olympic champion scribbles something down in her notebook.

Once, it was Vogel lifting these weights. In this very gym, in fact. Now, one of the greatest track sprinters of her generation is the one doing the coaching. Sixteen months after the horrific training crash which left her paralysed from the chest down, Vogel has returned to work for the German federal police.

“I’ve been since 2008 on the federal police, and now it’s time to give something back,” she says simply of her decision to return.

This is not any old gym. We are at the Bundesleistungszentrum Kienbaum, a federal sports complex located about 22 miles east of Berlin, near the border with Poland. The facility is a relic of the German Democratic Republic – Olympic athletes have been training here since 1952 – and it retains something of an Eastern Bloc feel to it with its charmless residential units and sports halls. But looks can be deceiving. Most of the summer sports within Germany’s high-performance system come here to use its state-of-the-art facilities.

It also houses the Kienbaum Federal Police Sport College, which runs a 'dual careers' programme training up some of the nation’s best young athletes while simultaneously preparing them for life in the federal police. Vogel herself was a trainee police officer here. She returned to Kienbaum’s lecture halls just days after winning team sprint gold at London 2012 – famously, the event which saw Victoria Pendleton and Jess Varnish disqualified in the semi-finals.

Other cyclists who have come through Kienbaum's dual careers programme include Rene Enders, Stefan Botticher, Robert Forstemann, Joachim Eilers and Charlotte Becker.

Vogel's return to Kienbaum this time is another extraordinary step in the career of an athlete who simply refuses to slow down despite her paralysis. As well as her police work, Vogel is also a local politician, a motivational speaker, a television commentator and sits on two commissions for cycling’s world governing body the UCI.

“Sometimes, I feel like I need 48 hours a day,” she admits, giggling. “I’m also writing a book! Or at least, someone’s writing it for me. I have a ghost. We’re planning to publish next summer. Probably August or September.”

Vogel’s positivity is extraordinary. Her accident at Cottbus velodrome on June 26 last year, when she collided at close to 40mph with a Dutch cyclist who was practising his standing starts, left the 28-year-old paraplegic, her spinal cord severed at the seventh thoracic vertebra. There were some dark months that followed, as Vogel came to terms with the accident.

But since leaving hospital in December last year, she has not stopped pushing her boundaries.

There have been setbacks; difficult times. In February, Vogel was back in a velodrome, commentating on the world track championships in Pruszkow, Poland. “There was a crash in the women’s omnium at one point,” she recalls. “The New Zealand girl in the Madison. They had to take her away on a stretcher. When I saw her being carried out of the track, I was like, ‘Woah.’ I had to ask my producer for five minutes to calm down.”

She still calls friends and “cries down the phone” sometimes. But those days are becoming fewer and fewer as she has gradually reclaimed her independence.

“For a long time, I was scared to be on my own,” she says. “I didn’t know how to survive outside of a hospital. In June or July, it was the first time I was for three or four days on my own in Erfurt, where I live. It is crazy actually, in just a few months … Now I can say I am mostly independent. Of course, there are a few things I still need help with. But I know when there is a problem I will find a way. And if I can’t, I will ask for help.”

Vogel’s boyfriend, the former cyclist Michael Seidenbecher - who has ducked into the gym to check on her - smiles at this comment. Vogel laughs. She admits she can “sometimes be a bit too proud”.

“Michael and all the people who are hanging around with me, they know if I have a problem not to offer to help! Like doing the transfer between the wheelchair and the car, I was really angry if someone stepped in to help me. But now I know I can do this, now it’s OK. I’m more comfortable with asking for help.”

It is clear the competitive juices have not deserted Vogel. She is only half joking when she scoffs at the new world record set last month in the flying 200 metres to Canada’s Kelsey Mitchell, which beat her own mark which had stood for six years. “Ah, the Pan-Am Games are always c--- for us,” she says. “They are on a 2,600m-high track in Bolivia! B-------. I could have a helmet in my wheelchair and still go faster." She smiles. "But 10.1 is quite fast, isn’t it? I actually thought it would hurt more than it did. It was always going to go at some point.”

There is no chance of her returning to competition as a para-athlete, though. Vogel's accident last year was the second serious one in her career. Her first, in 2009, left her in a coma for two days. “When I came around this time, before they flew me in the helicopter from Cottbus to Erfurt, I said to Michael, ‘I quit.’ That was a sign. I’m done.”

Does she miss it? She frowns. “It’s not that I miss competing,” she says. “It’s kind of hard to explain. I was stupid because I did the best job in the world, and I did what I loved the most, and it felt more like work than like a passion. I regret that I didn’t enjoy it more. It’s stupid that I needed this accident to realise that.”

Vogel has far too much to be getting on with now, anyway. In June she was elected to her local town council representing Angela Merkel’s CDU party. “It’s crazy, weird, seeing posters of yourself around town,” she says. “But I’m proud. It was another win!” Vogel is employed in the department for health and social services, working to improve facilities for the disabled, an area she admits she did not know much about before her accident but which makes her “more and more angry” now.

People parking in disabled spots without the correct badge enrages her. As for trains, she can hardly contain herself. “Did you know in Germany you have to call a hotline 24 hours before [you travel] if you are disabled? Then it depends. Is there free persons to put you in the train? Is there a place for you on the train? Is there free persons to carry you off the train? So, there are three things and if I don’t have them, I can’t travel. And you can’t plan anything at the last minute. If you are having a nice coffee or something and want to stay another hour with friends..no. Again, stupid. P----- me off.”

Vogel, clearly, is a force of nature. But she is also clearly still very fragile. She admits she recently got upset by a story that ran in the German tabloid Bild claiming that she was trying to get pregnant. “Normally, I should deal with it better,” she says. “But I was like, ‘F--- you!’ It’s not like it was written. Yes, I want to have a family with Michael one day. But not at the moment. I need to be able to take care of myself first.”

Vogel intends to be a better parent than her own father, who left the family after they moved to Germany from Kyrgyzstan when she was six months old. She has never had any contact with him apart from one phone call her mother made when they needed him to sign a form so that she could compete at junior world cup events in 2007. “The only thing he said was, ‘Do I have to pay something?’ He knew I was sitting next to Mama because she told him. He was not interested in me. It’s fine. We fixed our lives without his help.”

We make our way through the Kienbaum complex, returning to the police building. Michael - who transferred from Erfurt while Vogel was recovering in Berlin, and has a contract here until next September - rides past and pulls Vogel along in her wheelchair.

Vogel says she is still not 100 per cent certain she will carry on with this job. She has returned to Kienbaum on a trial basis to see how much she enjoys it. It is still "very early days" - we are speaking on only her third day back - but she suspects that she will. She is hugely proud to be a police officer. And this role is perfect in that the dual careers programme (a three and a half year course for the recruits) only runs from September to January, allowing her to spend the rest of the year doing all those other things she has committed to.

"I always planned to go back to the [police] station in Erfurt," she says. "But with my accident now I cannot work on the street, you know. When someone [a criminal] will run and I have to wait for the elevator! It would be stupid. That’s why I’m looking for what I can do in my wheelchair and still be part of the police.

"It's up to me," she adds. "There's no pressure. At the moment I’m just looking this winter to see whether I want to do this or not. It’s a trial. If I do stay I would need to go and study coaching. It’s a two-year course in Cologne. To be honest I’m not sure I have to [do the coaching course], but I never want that people say ‘You’re just an athlete not a real coach, shut up’. So I will do it." Vogel is not someone to do not do things by halves.

We say goodbye. Before leaving, I ask whether she is religious. After two near-death experiences she is clearly fired by something; a desire to make the absolute most of her life. And to help others make the most of theirs.

“My Mama is a Catholic," Vogel replies. "After my first accident she told me ‘God gives you these tests to challenge you’. To make you stronger.

"I always asked myself: ‘What is the reason why you are on Earth?’ Maybe this is it. Why not? It’s nice when you can believe that what you are doing is for something bigger. That you can do something on Earth to make it better for others.

"I always think, at the end of the day, if you can look in the mirror and be happy with the decisions you make, that is the best way to live. Of course, I’m not perfect. But mostly that is how I feel."