Annett Böhm

Annett Böhm

Annett Böhm (born 8 August 1980 in Meerane, Saxony) is a German Judoka.

Career

She began practicing Judo in PSC Glauchau/Meerane at the age of 7 years. Her first coaches were Erhard and Michael Hinke. In 1995 she went to a sport boarding school in Leipzig where she trained as part of the high performance Judo group. Böhm finished her Master of Sport science at the University of Leipzig in 2005. In 2007 she started to study journalism.

Her coach since 1999 has been Norbert Littkopf. He was for several years also the coach of the German women's national team.

Her first major success was in 1997, when she won the gold medal at the European Junior Championships in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Two years later she won the silver medal. She gained 5th place at the 2000 European Judo Championships in Wrocław, Poland and won her first gold medal at the German National Championships.

In her first World Judo Championships—2003 in Osaka, Japan—she surprisingly won the bronze medal. This qualified her for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. In Athens she won a bronze medal in the middleweight (70 kg) division. She beat opponents Quin Dongya (China) and Catherine Roberge (Canada). In the semi-final she lost her only fight against Edith Bosch (Netherlands). After this fight, Böhm beat Catherine Jacques (Belgium) in only 38 seconds with an ippon-score (Te-Guruma) for a bronze medal.

In 2005, Böhm sustained several injuries. Six weeks before the 2005 World Championships in Cairo, Egypt, she broke her left foot. Nevertheless she battled through her injuries to narrowly miss bronze. In the following year she had several surgical procedures, which prevented her from going to the 2006 European Championships.

In 2007 she qualified for the World Championships in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She only won one fight, placing her 9th place. This meant that she did not achieve direct qualification for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. However, in 2008 she returned to her old form. She won bronze medals at the Super World Cup in Paris, France and Sofia, Bulgaria. This placed her among the top 5 on the European ranking list, which qualified her for the Olympics. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, she lost the bronze medal match of the middleweight (70 kg) division to American Ronda Rousey.

In 2010 Böhm joined the International Judo Federation Media Team and can regularly be heard and seen as a commentator covering major international championships. In addition, Böhm contributes to IJF event reports where her journalistic skills are put to good use.

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External links

References