Maria Kühn is a 1.0-point wheelchair basketball player who plays for SV Reha Augsburg in the German wheelchair basketball league. She has also played in the German national team, with which she won two European titles, was runner-up at 2010 World Championships, and won a gold medal at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London. Having won the gold medal, President Joachim Gauck awarded the team the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt, Germany's highest sporting honour.
Kühn is a 1.0-point wheelchair basketball player. Before her accident, she was physically active with swimming, cycling and running. Afterwards, she took up wheelchair dancing as a form of exercise, but later switched to wheelchair basketball, although she had never been much interested in ball sports. She moved to Ludwigsburg to play for SV Reha Augsburg in the German national league in 2009, but switched to the Frankfurt for the 2011/12 season. Since 2009, her coach has been Brigit Meitner. Kühn joined the national team in 2009, while in Stuttgart, where she now lives. On 11 July 2009 during the International Paralympic Day celebration in Berlin, the team showed up at the Brandenburg Gate before 58,000 visitors, and Kühn gave President Horst Köhler a demonstration of the sport. The team won gold at the European Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Stoke Mandeville, England, in 2009, and silver at the Wheelchair Basketball World Championship in Birmingham, England the following year. In 2011, they again won the European Championship, which this time was held in Nazareth, Israel. In June 2012, Kühn was named as one of the team that competed at the 2012 Summer Paralympic Games in London. In the Gold Medal match, the team 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 defeated the Australians 44–58 in front of a capacity crowd of over 12,000 at the North Greenwich Arena to win the gold medal, the first that Germany had won in women's wheelchair basketball at the Paralympic Games since Stoke Mandeville in 1984. They were awarded a Silbernes Lorbeerblatt, Germany's highest sporting honour, by President Joachim Gauck in November 2012, named Team of the Year for 2012.
