Handball European Championship: Viola Leuchter, the greatest German hope in handball sports

If you ask Viola Leuchter where she sees her greatest strength in handball, the 20-year-old national player answers quite dryly: “I can throw quite well.” That’s true, but in this slightly laconic formulation it’s a hopeless understatement. Awe-struck teammates on the national team speak of Leuchter’s throws from the second row as being “crazy explosive.”

The 1.87 meter long Leuchter is literally the biggest German hope in the right back. “I’m a shooter,” she says with the same mischievous undertone with which she likes to answer questions in interviews. For example, why she actually plays as a right-hander in the right backcourt. This is due to the curious fact that although in everyday life she does everything with her right hand, she only plays handball with her left. She insists that she doesn’t know why, but emphasizes that her parents never used to tie her right hand behind her back. In fact, she couldn’t throw nearly as hard with her right as with her left.

With Leuchter, who is equally powerful in jumping and throwing, as the biggest player, the German team has a few more hopes of finally reaching a semi-final at the European Championships in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland. It’s been 16 years since the last one for German handball players. Leuchter says she’s a rather carefree type, but with this carefree attitude she explains: “It’s about time we beat one of the big ones.” The big ones are: Norway, France, Denmark and Sweden – in that order four best nations recently at the Olympics.

Her dream: to win the Olympic Games with the national team

The number seven plays a mystical role in Leuchter’s handball dream. She started playing handball at the age of seven and, like her father and grandfather and like her favorite literary hero Harry Potter, she prefers to wear the number seven when playing Quidditch. In the national team it is the 77th.

Although she has been playing handball for 13 years and came second in the European Championships in 2021 with the German U17 and was German A youth champion with Bayer Leverkusen in 2022, Leuchter has experienced pretty much everything you can experience in a handball career in the last twelve months alone: A year ago she celebrated her tournament debut at the World Cup in Denmark at the age of 19, was the best German shooter with 25 goals, but broke in the last one World Cup game, received the news while returning from the hospital that she had been voted the best young player at the World Cup, struggled through four months of rehab, moved from Bayer Leverkusen to German champions SG BBM Bietigheim (who moved to Ludwigsburg in the summer and now operates under HB Ludwigsburg), returned to the field in time for the Olympic Games, is now playing with Ludwigsburg in the Champions League, and was on the field when this team played at the end of October for the first time since Lost another Bundesliga game three and a half years ago and now dreams a bit about winning a medal with the national team. If that doesn’t work at this European Championship, then maybe in twelve months at the home World Cup.

Leuchter, who graduated from high school two and a half years ago and was then part of the Bundeswehr’s sports support group for a year, is currently a full professional, focuses entirely on playing handball, but is toying with parallel (distance learning) studies in German, literature or journalism. She also finds a sporting commitment abroad, such as five of the current national team players playing in France, Hungary and Romania, fundamentally appealing – but she has only been in Ludwigsburg for a few weeks now and feels right at home there. At the European Championships, four Ludwigsburg colleagues are part of the German team: Jenny Behrend, Mareike Thomaier, Xenia Smits and Antje Döll.

In rehab she learned a lot about the body and the function of pain

The serious injury a year ago was a blow. Initially, fear shaped her view of the future, then a lengthy rehab followed at her former club. “I was able to do the rehab with the Bayer Leverkusen footballers,” she says, “the conditions were of course optimal.” During this time she learned a lot “about the body and the function of pain.” She can now understand the body’s signals better. “In this respect, this injury break was extremely educational for me, even though I would have liked to have done without it, and I have the feeling that I have grown personally because of it.” It does something to you “when you have to work your way out of a hole again.” It also helped her during this difficult time to keep her goal of the Olympics in mind.

For the first time in 16 years, a German women’s handball team took part in the Olympic Games. “It was great to be able to experience that,” says Leuchter and doesn’t complain about losing to the French hosts in the quarter-finals and once again missing out on a semi-final.

During the Olympic tournament, the team narrowly lost to three of the big four nations: by three goals against Sweden, by one against Denmark and by three against France. “The gap to these teams is not big – but we need a good day from all players in order to be able to beat the big ones,” says Leuchter.

They get new opportunities at the European Championships. After a preliminary round in Innsbruck with opponents Ukraine (Friday), the Netherlands (Sunday) and Iceland (Tuesday), opponents Norway and Denmark lurk in the main round in Vienna. They will have to beat at least one of them to reach the semi-finals. Maybe Viola Leuchter can help with that. They say she can throw quite well.