Liebhardt wins shot put gold at Rio Paralympics despite transplants

At the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, German athlete Franziska Liebhardt won gold in the shot put and silver in the long jump. The result came in mid-September, during the second week of the Games.

Liebhardt competed as a transplant recipient. She lived with a donated lung and a donated kidney, and her sporting success was built on years of medical care and rehabilitation after those operations.

Her medals drew wide attention in Germany, partly because of the story behind them. She became one of the country's best-known examples of how an organ transplant can allow a person to return to demanding elite sport.

The Rio performance also gave her a public platform. In the following years she used her profile to speak about organ donation, a subject of long-running debate in Germany, where donor numbers have been low compared with many other European countries. Her Rio gold remained the best-known moment of her sporting career and the starting point for much of that advocacy.