Marina Mohnen

[2][3] She took up wheelchair basketball as a 4.5-point player,[1][2] initially playing for her home town team in Bitburg, but she subsequently moved to Koblenz, then to Bonn, and then to Cologne, where she now lives again after a stint in Italy.

[9] Mohnen beat Olympic gold medallists Britta Heidemann, Marion Rodewald and Oksana Chusovitina, and long-distance runner Sabrina Mockenhaupt, to take the title of Cologne's Sportswoman of the Year for 2008.

[10] Mohnen was part of the team that won the European Championship for the sixth time in a row in Nazareth in 2011, thereby qualifying for the 2012 Summer Paralympic Games in London.

In the gold medal match in London, the team faced the Australia women's national wheelchair basketball team,[13] who had defeated them 48–46 in Sydney just a few months earlier,[14] in front of a capacity crowd of over 12,000 at the North Greenwich Arena,[13] that included Mohnen's mother Kati and sister Sonja.

[15] They defeated the Australians 44–58 to win the gold medal,[13] the first that Germany had won in women's wheelchair basketball since 1984, a 28-year period.

[2] They were awarded the Silver Laurel Leaf by President Joachim Gauck in November 2012,[17] and were named Team of the Year for 2012.

Marina Mohnen in Birmingham in July 2010