Photography Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert
A little exercise to get you started: close your eyes briefly, imagine a bar 1.99 meters high, mentally take a run and jump over it. Who did it as we – in our minds we sneaked under the crossbar like a fat sloth – can relate to our enthusiasm for what the 24-year-old Marie-Laurence Jungfleisch is doing. She just returned from the World Championships in Beijing where the young German came very close to her next goal, the 2 m crossbar. The 1.82 m beauty doesn’t own a single pair of high heels, but lots of sneakers from Nike. She wears her favorite item, the sweatpants, almost every day in a pretty fashionable way – like here, the warming Tech Fleece.
“I want to improve every year and perfect my technique”, says the Paris-born daughter of a Frenchman from Martinique and a German mother who claims to be her biggest critic. At this point in her life she doesn’t have a lot of time to persue her education as an educator, even though she really misses working with children from different backgrounds. Formerly a victim of racism herself she’s standing up for the German Interior Ministry’s initiative “Foul von Rechtsaußen – Sport und Politik verein(t) für Toleranz, Respekt und Menschenwürde”. Great girl, isn’t she?
