Paralympic Champion Franziska Liebhardt Dies at 44

Franziska Liebhardt death, Digi Mart USA News (Würzburg, Germany): Paralympic champion Franziska Liebhardt has died at the age of 44, the German Disability Sports Association (DBS) announced. She died in Würzburg.

Liebhardt won a surprise gold medal in the shot put and a silver medal in the long jump at the 2016 Paralympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. The Berlin-born athlete was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2005, when she was 23 years old.

As a result of the illness, she suffered spastic paralysis, among other complications, and required a new lung as well as a kidney transplant. She used her sporting success to draw attention to organ donation.

Immediately after her Paralympic triumph, Liebhardt said: “I don’t want to make too much of this. But the image of organ donation is not very positive in Germany.

I want to counter that.” She added: “If just ten people fill out a donor card, it has already been worthwhile.”

After ending her athletic career, she became volunteer chair in 2024 of the association Kinderhilfe Organtransplantation – Sportler für Organspende e.V. (KiO).

Her own health remained challenging. In 2019, her lung transplant chronically failed, and she needed another donor lung.

During the coronavirus pandemic she spent seven months on the waiting list before a lung was found in 2020. At that time she said: “When a serious illness flares up again, it is important not to struggle with immutable facts, but to make peace with your body or the situation.”

In spring 2026, another serious illness emerged, and she died of its complications at the age of 44. The reports do not specify which illness it was.

KiO wrote on its website: “The challenge was too insidious, too aggressive.”

The DBS mourned “a great athlete and a wonderful person,” according to its obituary, describing Liebhardt as a “fighter, in sport as in everyday life.” KiO also paid tribute, saying: “Liebhardt could apparently move mountains.” It said her empathy and humility shaped work in an “emotionally stirring field.”