Last week, right after winning Olympic gold in Marseille, sailing star Lara Vadlau surprised in an Ö3 interview with the news that she was separated from her girlfriend Lea Schüller. She didn’t want to say anything more about the end of the relationship with the Bayern Munich star. Today (Sunday) Lara Vadlau was a guest on Ö3’s “Breakfast with Me” together with sailing partner Lukas Mähr and revealed why the separation happened.
“Lea and I met in 2019. I lived with her in Munich and she experienced my student life. When I said I wanted to sail again, she gave me great support,” explained the 30-year-old from Carinthia on Ö3. She had interrupted her sailing career to study medicine. “But then things got difficult. We were two professional athletes again and traveled a lot. We saw each other two or three days a month and often when I got home she was out. At some point the moment came when she said she couldn’t do it anymore because she was suffering so much from the fact that we never saw each other – and every time I packed my bags again, it was like a separation for her. “She said she can’t do it anymore and that she wants to support me as best she can and not stand in my way of achieving my goal,” said Lara Vadlau, describing the feelings of her ex-partner Lea Schüller on Ö3. “She said it’s better if we don’t get in each other’s way, if we both concentrate on our sport and combine our strengths. That’s why we decided to go our separate ways for now. Of course that’s a shame, but it is what it is.”
This separation after four and a half years of relationship would have happened in November last year, said Vadlau in an interview with Ö3 presenter Claudia Stöckl. But Schüller and she kept it secret “because it was important to us that we represented the sporting focus and that our private lives were not written about.” Whether there was still a chance for the relationship now, in the quiet times after the Olympics, Stöckl asked. Vadlau: “At some point you grow apart when time is so short and you no longer follow the same path. That’s an incredible shame because we were certainly the dream couple in the eyes of many. We were both proud of it too. At the moment we have developed in different directions. Now it’s completely done, but you can’t predict the future. We are good friends now and wish each other all the best.”
In Ö3’s “Breakfast with Me” she left it open whether the Olympic champion wanted to continue with professional sailing – and she hasn’t made any decisions in her private life either: “I wouldn’t describe myself as homosexual, I have just as much fun with men. For me it’s about people. If a person particularly impresses and fascinates me, I want to spend more time with that person. For me there was never a reason to come out because I was taught early on: ‘Go through your life, it doesn’t matter what others think. The main thing is that you can look yourself in the mirror.’ That’s why I always walked the streets with my chest proud, because there was never a reason to hide.”
Claudia Stöckl’s entire Ö3 interview is available online
(https://oe3.orf.at/) and always as an Ö3 podcast on ORF-Sound:
https://sound.orf.at/podcast/oe3/fruehstueck-bei-mir.