You’re 27, at the peak of your athletic career, and your doctor just told you that your heart is basically trying to kill you. Most people would hang up their spikes and call it a day. Katharina Bauer? She told her doctors to operate immediately because she had championships to win.
This is the story of Germany’s most audacious pole vaulter – a woman who literally defied death to chase her Olympic dreams, armed with nothing but a defibrillator, an unshakeable belief in herself, and the kind of stubborn determination that makes coaches weep with joy.
The Fire Begins
Born on June 12, 1990, in Wiesbaden, Katharina Bauer discovered pole vaulting the way most kids discover their favorite candy – accidentally, but with immediate and total obsession. While other children were playing with dolls or video games, young Katharina was already eyeing those intimidating crossbars, calculating trajectories in her head like some sort of athletic savant.
But here’s where the story gets interesting, in that heart-stopping way that makes sports biographies either legendary or tragic. By age seven, Katharina’s heart was already staging its own private rebellion, throwing in an extra 6,000 beats per day just for kicks. Most hearts beat around 110,000 times daily – hers was working overtime like an overachieving intern.
“Pole vaulting is my big love,” she would later say, and you can hear the passion burning in those words. This wasn’t just a sport for her; it was oxygen, sustenance, life itself. Even as her heart literally worked against her, she was vaulting toward greatness with the kind of single-minded focus that separates good athletes from legends.
The early signs were there, but Katharina did what many elite athletes do when faced with inconvenient medical realities – she kept her mouth shut and kept jumping. Her condition remained a closely guarded secret, shared only with her inner circle. In the hyper-competitive world of professional athletics, showing weakness is often seen as career suicide. So she buried the fear deep and let her performances do the talking.
Katharina Bauer: Rising Through the Ranks
By the time most people were figuring out what they wanted to study in college, Katharina was already representing Germany on the international stage, quietly building a reputation as one of Europe’s most consistent pole vaulters. Her personal bests – 4.65 meters outdoors and 4.60 meters indoors – weren’t just numbers on a board; they were testament to years of grinding, of pushing through pain both physical and psychological.
Her trophy cabinet tells the story: European Team Championships bronze, multiple European Indoor Championships finals, including an impressive 8th place finish in 2013 and 6th place qualifying position in 2015. Under the expert guidance of renowned coach Leszek Klima, she was transforming from promising talent into legitimate contender.
But all the while, her heart was ticking like a time bomb. In 2009, at just 18, she underwent her first heart surgery – an attempt to stop the electrical chaos in her chest. The procedure “didn’t really work,” as she would later put it with characteristic understatement. The extra beats continued, a constant reminder that her body was fighting a war on two fronts: one against gravity, another against itself.
The Perfect Storm
Fast-forward to 2017. Katharina Bauer was riding high, her career trajectory pointing steadily upward. Then her heart decided to escalate things dramatically. Those 6,000 extra beats per day? Try 18,000. Her heart wasn’t just working overtime anymore – it was staging a full-blown revolt.
A second surgery initially seemed to help, bringing the count down to a more manageable 3,000. But like a bad sequel, the improvement was short-lived. By the end of the outdoor season, she was back up to 15,000 extra beats daily. Despite this cardiac chaos, she managed to win the German indoor title in 2018 – a victory that, in retrospect, seems almost superhuman.
Then came the gut punch that would change everything. A routine three-day ECG before her warm-weather training in South Africa revealed a new, infinitely more dangerous type of abnormal heartbeat. This wasn’t just extra beats anymore—this was ventricular fibrillation territory, the kind of arrhythmia that drops athletes mid-stride and makes headlines for all the wrong reasons.
“This moment, when I was told that, I thought it would be really awful: My life is now over,” Katharina Bauer later recalled. “I really struggled heavily for three, four months.”
For someone whose identity was so deeply intertwined with athletic excellence, the prospect of forced retirement wasn’t just career-ending—it was existential annihilation. But here’s where Katharina Bauer showed the world what champions are really made of.
Katharina Bauer: The Impossible Decision
April 17, 2018. While most 27-year-olds were worried about career advancement and weekend plans, Katharina was having a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter-defibrillator surgically placed in her chest. The Boston Scientific EMBLEM™ MRI S-ICD System – essentially a guardian angel with an electrical personality disorder, designed to shock her heart back to life if it ever decided to quit mid-vault.
Her doctors thought she was “mad” for wanting to continue pole vaulting. And honestly? They weren’t wrong to be concerned. The device, roughly the size of her palm and weighing 300 grams, was positioned below her latissimus muscle – a critical muscle for pole planting. It felt, in her words, like carrying a “rock” next to her heart.
But here’s where Katharina’s story transcends typical sports narratives. Just two weeks after the implantation, an ECG revealed something extraordinary: her extra heartbeats had dropped from 15,000 to 2,800 daily, without any additional surgery. She attributes this miraculous improvement to “mental training, hypnosis, and manipulating my self-regulating forces” – a testament to the power of the mind-body connection that sounds like new-age nonsense until you see the medical data backing it up.
Katharina Bauer: The Comeback Kid
Six weeks post-surgery, Katharina Bauer stepped onto the runway for her first competition with her new cardiac companion. The bar was set at 4.20 meters – a height that would challenge any healthy athlete, let alone someone carrying 300 grams of medical equipment in their chest. She cleared it like it was a casual warm-up.
“I’m convinced mental training, hypnosis, and manipulating my self-regulating forces really helped with this,” she said, and you have to admire someone who credits both cutting-edge medical technology and ancient mindfulness techniques for their success.
Less than a year later, she earned silver at the German Indoor Athletics Championship. Her momentum was building like a perfectly executed vault—controlled, powerful, unstoppable. She qualified for the European Indoor Championships in just her second indoor competition post-surgery, then went on to compete at the 2019 World Championships in Doha.
Think about that for a moment. A woman with a defibrillator in her chest, competing against the world’s best pole vaulters, in one of sport’s most demanding events. She described herself as “somewhat of a guinea pig for the doctors,” pioneering new territory in sports medicine with every jump.
Redefining Possible
The defibrillator, initially a symbol of limitation, became her secret weapon. “The defibrillator feels like a sort of safety net,” she explained. “Before it was fitted, I was 90 percent confident everything was going to be okay. Now my confidence is way over 100 percent.”
This psychological transformation – from burden to blessing – reveals something profound about elite athletic mindset. Champions don’t just overcome obstacles; they weaponize them. Katharina’s ICD wasn’t holding her back; it was setting her free to vault without the constant fear of sudden cardiac death.
Her goal was audacious: to become the first Olympian to compete with a defibrillator. When the Tokyo Olympics finally arrived in 2021 (delayed by a global pandemic that seems almost quaint compared to Katharina’s personal challenges), she was there, ICD and all, representing Germany on sport’s biggest stage.
The journey wasn’t without setbacks. A complicated hand operation cost her the 2016 Olympics, and a herniated disc threatened her Tokyo dreams. But setbacks, as Katharina had learned, were just another type of training. Her coach Leszek Klima noticed subtle changes in her approach – she was “unconsciously always a little less willing to take risks” – but her spirit remained unbroken.
The Wisdom of Knowing When
By 2023, at age 33, Katharina Bauer’s body was sending increasingly clear signals that it was time for a new chapter. Panic attacks began accompanying her training sessions – her nervous system finally rebelling against years of extraordinary stress. On September 10, 2023, in Beckum, she competed for the final time as an elite pole vaulter.
The decision to retire brought immediate relief. “The pains and panic attacks stopped as soon as I voiced my decision,” she revealed, highlighting the invisible psychological toll that even the most resilient athletes carry.
But retirement didn’t mean retreat. If anything, it marked the beginning of Katharina’s most important competition yet.
The Next Chapter
Today, Katharina Bauer has transformed from pole vaulting pioneer to wellness warrior. She’s become a sought-after motivational speaker, specializing in mindset and health communication. Her book, “Yoga for a Strong Heart: Promoting heart health with the right exercises, meditation and breathing techniques,” became a bestseller in Germany – proof that her audience extends far beyond track and field enthusiasts.
She leads wellness retreats like the “Heart & Health” yoga retreat in the Maldives, where she teaches the integration of exercise, mindfulness, and inner peace for comprehensive heart health. Her approach is holistic, recognizing that true wellness extends far beyond mere medical intervention.
“I feel a calling therein, to pass something on to other people,” she says, and you can hear the same passion that once drove her vaulting ambitions now channeled into helping others navigate their own seemingly impossible challenges.
Her story has become a touchstone in discussions about athletes with cardiac conditions, frequently referenced alongside cases like Dutch footballer Daley Blind and Danish footballer Christian Eriksen (read our article: “From Cardia Arrest to Soccer Triumph“), who have also continued their careers with ICDs. Der Spiegel featured her comeback story, cementing her status as a symbol of possibility in the face of medical adversity.
The Fire Still Burns
Katharina’s legacy extends far beyond her pole vaulting achievements. She’s fundamentally changed the conversation around chronic illness in elite sport, proving that with the right technology, mindset, and support system, the supposedly impossible becomes merely improbable.
Her journey challenges every assumption about limitations – medical, physical, psychological. She served as a “guinea pig” for sports medicine, providing real-world data that will inform decisions for future athletes facing similar challenges. More importantly, she demonstrated that passion, properly channeled, can literally move mountains.
“When you have the feeling the fire in you is burning, you can do anything you want or you believe in,” she says, and after everything she’s accomplished, who’s going to argue with that?
In a world obsessed with superhero narratives, Katharina Bauer offers something more powerful: proof that ordinary humans, armed with extraordinary determination and the courage to redefine what’s possible, can achieve the truly impossible.
Her heart may have tried to kill her, but it ended up making her immortal – not through her pole vaulting records, but through her demonstration that the human spirit, when properly motivated, recognizes no limits. And honestly? That’s a story worth jumping for.
Photo Von Ailura, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT, CC BY-SA 3.0 at,
