Speedway world champion Celina Liebmann: The best in the world

She was lying on the train in Güstrow near Rostock, gasping for air and unable to move. Celina Liebmann had a serious fall at the 2017 German Speedway Championships. At that moment there was little to suggest that the daredevil would be able to continue her career. The then 16-year-old was taken to the hospital in the rescue helicopter and was diagnosed with a fractured thoracic vertebra, just shy of paraplegia. But even this severe injury didn’t make her stop. “For two or three days I was sure it was over,” she says today, a good seven years later. “But after recovery it was no longer an issue at all.”

Motorcycle racing is tough, something the speedway rider has experienced often enough in her career. She once broke her upper arm and gave her father Jürgen the unmistakable instruction while she was still receiving medical treatment: “Take the motorcycles to the recycling center.” Of course he didn’t.

And that was the right decision from Celina’s point of view, who calls herself “Z” for Zeppelin. The 23-year-old is a motorsport athlete with heart and soul and is merciless when she leans into the curve in an extremely lean position and fights for top positions on the oval track at 75 speeds on a 500 cc machine with only one gear. Methanol is used as fuel because the alcohol produces more power when burned than gasoline. The bikes have no brakes, the speed is only determined by accelerating.

The petite Wasserburger, who lives in Albaching in the Rosenheim district, is no less than the best woman in this sport worldwide. This has been official since June 2024, when Liebmann won the title at the very first Women’s World Cup on the Teterow track in Mecklenburg.

So what does it feel like to actually be the best in the world? “It feels cool. For me it has always been the case that this stamp puts a lot of pressure on me. But it was never like that day. Everyone said I would win. And if I hadn’t done that, it would have been a huge issue,” she says. Celina Liebmann marched through the competition, won all of her heats, confidently qualified for the semi-finals, also won that race and was in the final race for the medals. There she got off to a good start and didn’t notice much of the drama behind her: Second-placed Nynke Sijbesma from the Netherlands collided violently with third-placed Anika Loftus from Australia. The gang was completely destroyed and both drivers had to be taken to hospital with broken bones.

At the World Championships she stood on the podium with the mothers of her competitors, and the riders had to go to the hospital

The race was not scored; instead, the jury formed a points classification from the previous rounds – Liebmann was world champion, behind her were the two people who fell. It was “strange” “when I stood on the podium with the mothers of the injured colleagues,” says Liebmann.

It wasn’t because of this bizarre scenery that another sporting success was “emotionally worth more at the time” for Liebmann, as she herself says. In 2017, she won the silver medal at the U17 World Championships in the 250 cc class – mind you, against a lot of boys. “That was such an awesome race. After the start I was in fifth place among six drivers, then I overtook three more. At the end everyone cried with joy.”

By which the family is meant, Liebmann’s great support. Her father works on their motorcycles as a mechanic, mother Sylvia takes care of the organization, and her two siblings are also fully involved. Without her dad, Jürgen, she would never have become a racing driver. The 54-year-old was successful as an ice speedway driver for ten years, won silver and bronze at the team world championships and came second several times at the German championships in this dangerous sport in which the pilots wear 28 millimeter long spikes on their tires.

When Celina was five years old, her father took her to a speedway race in Olching in the Fürstenfeldbruck district. “I wanted to drive since that day. And I’ve been driving ever since,” she says. Her father organized a Yamaha PW 50 for her to try out training, which was specially designed for children. And Celina was infected by the speedway virus. She soon switched to a 50 cc full cross bike and then the first races started. Once she even raced against the legendary four-time dirt track world champion Karl Maier, “I with a 125, he with a 500”.

She was soon successful in the juniors, and has now made a name for herself in the scene – also because she was the very first woman to win a place in the Speedway Great Britain (SGB) Championship, the second division of the most traditional speedway championship in the world world, up for grabs. She made the contact two years ago when she was in England for the first time and took part in the British Open Women Championship. When she drove to Workington, near the Scottish border, those responsible for Celina Liebmann’s team there were thrilled. She promptly received a contract for 2024, even if it wasn’t always entirely clear to her what the team bosses wanted from her: “The dialect there is so violent and they didn’t pull themselves together at all. Sometimes I had to ask five times. Then they typed it into their cell phone. The problem is that they write the same way they talk.”

It was a great honor to be the first woman to go there. Since then it has even had an English-language Wikipedia page, although there is no German one yet. In her team she rode with the Australian Troy Batchelor, the Finn Antti Vuolas, the Englishman Craig Cook and the Dane Claus Vissing. “They were all really cool and super communicative,” she says. The months all alone in a foreign country have allowed her to mature. In terms of sport, things went well, the Workington Comets finished fourth out of nine teams and lost in the playoff semi-finals to eventual champions Poole Pirates. Although Liebmann drove well, it currently looks as if the commitment will not continue in the new season. The teams are put together according to a complicated points system – and she doesn’t currently fit into the Comets’ squad.

In Wittstock, a Ukrainian involved her in a serious accident: “He didn’t give a shit what happened to me.”

The question remains whether another team will sign her. And then a topic comes up that has always accompanied Celina Liebmann: her role in the male-dominated racing sport. “Basically, the boys always think it’s cool to race against girls. But alas, you defeat them,” she says. She has had to live with this for almost ten years: “When we were little, no one cared. But at 14 it becomes the case that no one wants to lose to a girl.” This anger that a fast woman can trigger in proud competitors is sometimes not without danger: in 2020 in Wittstock in Brandenburg, the Ukrainian Andriy Rozaliuk was so annoyed by Liebmann that that he involved her in a violent accident in which she shattered her wrist and also broke her ulna and radius.

“It was definitely very unfair and very unsportsmanlike of him,” she told the trade media at the time Speedweek.com. Rozaliuk even got up and made it to the finish line: “He didn’t give a shit what was wrong with me.” She suspects that he couldn’t handle the fact that a woman was driving in front of him, says Liebmann.

Injuries always mean loss of earnings, because you only get money if you compete. The more points a speedway professional scores, the more money he earns. But without sponsors the business would not be financed; the trips and the technical equipment are too expensive. Liebmann had worked as a teacher; When she signed her first league commitment in Poland a few years ago, she quit her job and has been helping out with her main sponsor, a caretaker company in Wasserburg, ever since. Cutting hedges, climbing on roofs and clearing gutters or clearing snow in winter – such activities are no problem for the 23-year-old. And compared to her passion for speedway, a lot of it is harmless anyway.