Vera Zozuļa

Vera Zozuļa
nation	Soviet Union
birthday	January 15, 1956
place of birth	Talsi ,  Soviet Union
size	157 cm
Weight	69 kg
job	Toboggan trainer
Career
society	Vārpa
status	resigned
Medal table
Olympia 1 × 0 × 0 × World Cup medals 1 × 1 × 1 × EM medals 1 × 0 × 1 ×
winter Olympics gold 1980 Lake Placid singles  Luge World Championships silver 1977 Igls singles gold 1978 Imst singles bronze 1981 Hammarstrand singles  European Luge Championships gold 1976 Hammarstrand singles bronze 1978 Hammarstrand singles
Placements in the Luge World Cup
Podium placements 1. 2. 3.  Single seater 1 ? ?
last change: December 4th 2010

Vera Zozulya ( Russian Вера Васильевна Зозуля , Vera Vasilyevna Sosulja * 15. January 1956 in Talsi , Latvian SSR , Soviet Union ) is a former Latvian luger that starting for the Soviet Union Olympic champion was.

Vera Zozuļa is one of the most successful Soviet luge athletes. Before she concentrated on races in the ice channel, she started in natural track toboggan competitions , but without any notable successes. In 1975 and 1976 she won the Soviet championship. She achieved her first major success when she became European champion in Hammarstrand in 1976 . Two years later she won the bronze medal when the continental championship was hosted there again. In the same year she became world champion in Imst , after having become vice world champion behind Margit Schumann in 1977 . In 1981 she completed her set of medals at world championships with third place behind Melitta Sollmann and Cerstin Schmidt . In 1982 she won the overall ranking in the Luge World Cup . That season she also won her only World Cup race in Tatranská Lomnica .

Her first Olympic participation in Innsbruck in 1976 brought her ninth place, she was the only starter in her country in the women's competition. Four years later at the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid , she had an even more convincing success. She set the fastest time in all four races and became an Olympic champion. She was not only the first Latvian gold medalist at the Olympic Games, but is to this day ( after Pyeongchang 2018 ) the only non-German-speaking female tobogganer who won gold in luge at the Olympic Winter Games . Her last appearance at the Olympics was in Sarajevo in 1984 , when she was fifth behind three tobogganers from the GDR and her club mate at Vārpa Rīga, Ingrīda Amantova .

After the 1978 World Championships, Zozuļa was awarded the title of Honored Master of Sport . In 1985 she completed a trainer training at the Московская государственная академия физической культуры (Moscow State Academy for Physical Education) and then worked as a trainer for the Polish Luge Association. In 1995 she moved to her home country Latvia as national coach, where she was responsible for the Latvian Olympic teams in 1998 and 2002. Since 2012 she has coached the national team of Kazakhstan.

Zozuļa has been a member of the FIL Hall of Fame since 2006 .

successes

World Cup victories

singles

No.	date	place	train
1.	0Feb. 7, 1982	Tatranská Lomnica	Tatranská Lomnica bobsleigh track

Web links

• Vera Zozuļa in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Footnotes

1. ↑ ^{a b} Большая олимпийская энциклопедия "Яндекс" (Great Olympic Encyclopedia): Зозуля Вера Васильевна  ( page no longer available , search in web archives was automatically defective )  Info: The link was automatically broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Delfi.lv (Latvian)