Anna Meares

Anna Meares ( born September 21, 1983 in Blackwater ) is an Australian cyclist. She is two -time Olympic medalist and multiple world champion in short- disciplines of track cycling.

Sports career

Anna Meares began at the age of eleven years with the cycling and thus followed in the footsteps of her older sister Kerrie. Your idol was Australian racing driver Kathryn Watts. Although the next velodrome was two hours away, she opted for the track cycling.

The first big success of Meares was the bronze medal in the sprint at the Commonwealth Games 2002. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, she won the gold medal with a new world record ( 33.952 seconds ) and defeated in the final, the previous record holder Yonghua Jiang from China. So she was the first woman who broke the mark of 34 seconds in the 500 -meter time trial; at the same time she was the first Australian who won an Olympic gold medal.

In January 2008, Meares crashed on the track World Cup in Los Angeles hard and broke a neck vertebra, so that the end of her career was feared. But few months later, she won at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the silver medal in the sprint. In 2009, she finished third in the team sprint won first place at the UCI Track World Championships 2009 in Pruszkow. 2010 Anna Meares was the third time world champion in the 500m time trial and for the second time in the team sprint together with Kaarle McCulloch, the two riders lined up a new world record over 32.923 s. In the same year she won at the Commonwealth Games three gold medals: in the sprint, the team sprint and time trial.

2011, Meares Australian champion in the sprint and keirin in. In the UCI Track World Championships 2011 in Apeldoorn she was with three gold medals - in the sprint, keirin and team sprint - the most successful athlete. In the UCI Track World Championships 2012 in Melbourne, she won the silver medal together with McCulloch in the team sprint, became world champion in the time trial and presented two new world records. In the same year she was the second time Olympic gold medalist, in the sprint. In the second round of the UCI Track Cycling World Cup 2013/2014 in Aguascalientes Meares won the competition over 500 -meter time trial and found it a new world record at 32.836 seconds.

Private

As she convalesced after her serious accident in 2008 and again returned back to their old strength, Anne Meares describes in her autobiography published in 2009 "The Anna Meares story".

Anna Meares is an ambassador for the Little Heroes Foundation, a foundation that is committed to seriously ill children and their families. In January 2014 Meares announced that she would leave after the Commonwealth Games in 2014 in solidarity with scissors sick children go bald if they had collected up to that $ 250,000 in donations.

The sister of Anna Meares is also successful track cyclist Kerrie Meares.