"Sexy Anni Friesinger," known more for her racy photographs than her major successes on the speed skating track finally won gold Wednesday, giving the German team the most medals in the history of the Winter Olympic Games.

On the 12th day of competition Friesinger and teammate Sabine Voelker won gold and silver in the 1,500 meter women’s speed skating event. In winning, Friesinger broke the world record she set in Calgary in March 2001.

The 160-plus German team began the games with high hopes of bettering the 29 medals they won in Nagano – which tied them with the Soviet Union team of 1988 for most medals won. With the Friesinger and Voelker medals, the German team collected their 30th and 31st medals of the games, a new record.

Victory, finally

The victory was a major relief for Friesinger, who was medal-less after dominating women’s speed skating all last year. Tears rolled down her cheeks on the Olympic podium as her home two of Inzell, in Bavaria, went crazy.

"I had the shakes," her mother Janina Freisinger told reporters. "I didn’t know whether I was going to be sick or something else. I need a few days to digest everything."

After dominating the European and German speed skating championships, Friesinger was a heavy favorite for Olympic gold, above all in the 3,000m. When she took fourth, her reputation as a choke artist in big events looked in danger of coming true.

But Friesinger, who won every 1,500m race last year, came through in a big way, breaking her 1 minute 54.38 second world record with a time of 1 minute 54.02.

"I want to enjoy this day," she said after her victory. "Now all the pressure is done."

Making gold-medal-winning sexy

The victory was splashed across the tabloid Bild, Germany’s largest-circulating daily: "Sexy Anni Friesinger Races to World Record Gold!" The tabloid had written the day before that, if nothing else, the tattooed 25-year-old had "the Olympic Games’ most beautiful breasts."

With a few erotic photographs, most recently in Germany’s glitzy Max magazine, Friesinger has managed to transform herself into the pinup of German speed skating. She is proud of the distinction. She shows off the celtic flame tatoo on her stomach quite often and often says she finds her body and the bodies of speed skaters the sexiest in sports.

"There is nothing crunchier than a speed skater’s behind;" she wrote in Max recently.

But Friesinger’s image has also been tainted by her much-publicized spats with other members of the German team. She has criticized her teammate’s rigid training methods and accused Olympic gold winner Claudia Pechstein of feigning illness to give her a psychological advantage in a race last year.

The two reportedly don’t interact much with eachother, especially since papers reported Pechstein describing her teammate as "bitchy". In response, Friesinger hung a handmade sign on the house the German speed skating team shares in Salt Lake City.

It read "Bitch Zone".