After Oslo, She Glows

Winning Eurovision apparently suits Lena Meyer-Landrut in every possible way. At nineteen, fresh off taking the trophy in Oslo with Satellite, she looked better—sharper, lighter, visibly glad to still be standing—than in all the months of competition and press that led up to it.

Her mentor Stefan Raab, the German TV entertainer who more or less engineered her entire path to the contest, stood beside her in the photos looking slightly deflated. The man built the machine, got it to the finish line, and now the machine doesn’t need him anymore. You could see him processing that in real time. It’s a sweet kind of melancholy.