Johanna Welin

Johanna Welin (born 24 June 1984) is a Swedish-born German 2.0 point wheelchair basketball player. She played for USC Munich in the German wheelchair basketball league, and for the national team that won the gold medal at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, after which President Joachim Gauck awarded the team with the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt (Silver Laurel Leaf).

Biography Johanna Welin was born on 24 June 1984 in Pajala, Sweden, a small town near the border between Sweden and Finland about north of the Arctic Circle. She has played football for Töreboda IK in the Swedish league. In the winter, her passion was snowboarding, until a bad fall in a snowboarding competition at Gothenburg in January 2004 left her paralysed from the waist down. She then took up wheelchair basketball, playing for GRBK Gothenburg in the Swedish league, but Sweden had no national women's team. She spent two semesters studying German in Innsbruck, but there was no wheelchair basketball team there, and she began playing for USC Munich, initially for their second team. There, she caught the attention of Holger Glinicki, the coach of the German national team, who asked her if she would like to play for the German national team. She took German citizenship, a relatively painless procedure for an athlete, and made the German national team, which went on to win gold at the 2011 European Championships in Nazareth, Israel, defeating the Netherlands in the final, 48–42.

In June 2012 she was named as part of the team that competed at the 2012 Summer Paralympic Games in London, They defeated the Australians 44–58 in front of a capacity crowd of over 12,000 at the North Greenwich Arena to win the gold medal, the first that Germany had won in women's wheelchair basketball at the Paralympics since 1984. The German team claimed silver at the 2014 Women's World Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2014: Silver at the World Championships (Toronto, Canada) 2015: Gold at the European Championships (Worcester, England) 2016: Silver at the Paralympic Games (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Awards 2012: Team of the Year 2012: Silver Laurel Leaf 2013: Entry in the Golden Book of Munich