during his active career, Tim Lobinger was hardly to tame. The successful pole vaulters provoked, apart from his sporting achievements with eccentric cheering poses and explicit statements. And even today – more than three years after his leukemia diagnosis, the 47-Year-old war: The ongoing battle with the blood cancer he has accepted.

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test “once you’re diagnosed with leukemia, then you have this disease your life. Healthy there is no more for me,“ said Lobinger, in an Interview with Spox and Goal. For him it is now a question of “to stretch the life as long as possible”. He had to think “in smaller cycles that I notice in any investigation, which I have every two to four weeks”.

After the harrowing message to the Doctors in March of 2017, he tried to quickly “adapt to the Situation and to say: ‘Okay, I’m standing with my back to the wall, now I have to work and fight'”. Five chemo treatments and a stem cell transplant nourished the great hope for a cure, but in the spring of 2018, the blood cancer was back in the “slightly mutated Form.”

the Public was widespread at this time, a survival rate of around 30 percent. “There were also Doctors, the languages of one third of one third. 30 percent were very positive,“ said the native of the Rhine Bacher about his worst time, which was marked by long isolation times, daily blood transfusions, and little contact with friends and family. “I was at this time a passenger in my own life, so it felt that way.”

a Lot of power, the former world draw and European Champions in the hall of his involvement as an athletics coach: “to be so close to the performance sport and with guys like Joshua Kimmich and others to work together (…) – this is a kind of continuous dream for me, I fulfilled to me.” In 2016, Lobinger had started as an athletics coach at RB Leipzig, where he learned the present-day Bayern-Profi. As Kimmich was with him in the hospital, “he had the feeling that I’m helping him more than he me. But he has helped me a lot.“