Background
Johanna Welin was born on 24 June 1984 in Pajala, Sweden, a small town near the border between Sweden and Finland about 100 kilometres (62 mi) north of the Arctic Circle.
Johanna Welin was born on 24 June 1984 in Pajala, Sweden, a small town near the border between Sweden and Finland about 100 kilometres (62 mi) north of the Arctic Circle.
She has played football for Töreboda IK in the Swedish league. In the winter, her passion was snowboarding, until a bad fall in a snowboarding competition at Gothenburg in January 2004 left her paralysed from the waist down. She then took up wheelchair basketball, playing for GRBK Gothenburg in the Swedish league, but Sweden had no national women"s team
She spent two semesters studying German in Insbruck, but there was no wheelchair basketball team there, and she began playing for University of Southern California Munich, initially for their second team
There, she caught the attention of Holger Glinicki, the coach of the German national team, who asked her if she would like to play for the German national team In June 2012 she was named as part of the team that competed at the 2012 Summer Paralympic Games in London, where they faced the Australia women"s national wheelchair basketball team, a team that had defeated them 48-46 in Sydney just a few months before.
They were awarded another Silver Laurel Leaf by President Joachim Gauck in November 2012 and were again named Team of the Year for 2012. In February 2013, Welin"s name was entered in the Golden Book of Munich.
She has modelled for the advertising campaigns of team sponsors International Netherlands Group DiBa and LoFric, and is currently studying medicine in Munich.
2011: Gold European Championships (Nazareth, Israel).
2011: Gold European Championships (Nazareth, Israel) 2012: Gold Paralympic Games (London, England) 2013: Silver European Championships (Frankfurt, Germany) 2014: Silver at the World Championships (Toronto, Canada) 2015: Gold at the European Championships (Worcester, England) 2012: Team of the Year 2012: Silver Laurel Leaf 2013: Entry in the Golden Book of Munich.
