Sophia Floersch’s Macau GP crash return wins Laureus Comeback Award
- Teenage driver was back to racing within four months of life-threatening crash and dreaming of Formula One success
- Lewis Hamilton and Lionel Messi share award, with Simone Biles, South Africa rugby and Sachin Tendulkar also honoured
The 19-year-old Formula Three driver described it as “a dream come true when she picked up her award in Berlin at the 20th anniversary Laureus World Sports Awards on Monday. She also thanked the Laureus Academy, her family and her doctor.
“I started this sport when I was four and loved it from the first moment onwards. I had this crash in Macau and it was bad, the video was very bad, but for me in the car it didn’t feel that bad. I remember everything. It happened so quick you don’t really realise it.
“It was hard times but for me I always had the goal to come back in race car, which was happening 106 days later.”
“Hopefully I am going to be up on this stage in some years again, Sportswoman of the Year,” she said to applause from the crowd of sports stars gathered in the German capital.
The German driver was injured after coming off the track at the Lisboa Bend at the Guia circuit. She entered the bend at 276km/h, clipped a raised kerb then hit the top of Japanese driver Sho Tsuboi’s TOM'S Dallara-Toyota car.
Her car went through the catch fencing before landing backwards in a photographer’s hut through the safety fencing and into a photographers’ platform.
Floersch, just 17 at the time, suffered life-threatening injuries, according to her Van Amersfoort Racing team owner Fritz van Amersfoort.
She was rushed to the Conde S. Januario Hospital along with Tsuboi, two photographers and a race marshal. The 17-year-old underwent 11 hours of spinal surgery at the Macau hospital before months of recovery where she could not move her neck or back.
“I’ll see how it goes, but my goal is to get to Formula One and have success there and maybe be world champion,” she said in December 2018.
Other winners at the Berlin awards, which are voted for by journalists from around the world, included six-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton. The 35-year-old shared the World Sportsman of the Year with Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi.
This was the first time the award had been shared in its 20 years of running and the first time a footballer had won.
Elsewhere, gymnast Simone Biles led the US’ four-award haul. Biles won Sportswoman of the Year after five more world championships golds cemented her place as the most decorated gymnast in history.
Snowboard star Chloe Kim won the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year Award for the second year running, while Oksana Masters won the Laureus Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability category.
Cycling and skiing star Masters, who won medals in both events in 2019, was born with limb impairments caused by radiation fallout from Chernobyl before being adopted by an American.
South Africa’s men’s rugby team won the Team of the Year Award for lifting the Rugby World Cup in Japan, beating out strong competition from Uefa Champions League winners and English Premier League runners-up Liverpool, and the US women’s national football team that won the Fifa Women’s World Cup in France.
Egan Bernal, the youngest winner of the Tour de France in 110 years, won the World Breakthrough of the Year, while at the other end of the scale NBA legend Dirk Nowitzki won the Lifetime Achievement Award.
The German retired at the end of the 2018-19 season after 21 years in the NBA, all with the Dallas Mavericks.
The Spanish Basketball Federation became only the fourth winner of a Laureus Academy Exceptional Achievement Award in two decades. The men’s team won the Fiba 2019 World Cup in China and are expected to challenge in Tokyo 2020, while the women have been European champions in three of the last four years.
In a first public vote, Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar won the Sporting Moment award for guiding his country to the 2011 ICC World Cup, with success for the “Little Master” coming at the sixth attempt and on home soil. The award looked at a moment in the past two decades where sport brought people together.
