Katarina Witt

Skating took over Witt's life. She left for practice at seven in the morning and did not return home until dinnertime. When she was nine years old, Witt caught the attention of Jutta Mueller, East Germany's most successful skating coach. Mueller took over the girl's training, and Witt was soon spending more time with her coach than she did with her parents. In addition to perfecting her technical and athletic abilities, Mueller worked with Witt to develop her showmanship. Mueller drew out a sense of seductiveness in the skater, which made her an engaging performer. Witt learned how to maximize her natural beauty with makeup and glitzy costumes.

Witt executed her first triple salchow—a complicated leaping, rotating jump—when she was eleven years old and Mueller decided she was ready for competition. Headstrong Witt was weakest in the compulsories category, where skaters must complete simple but exact figure eights, circles, and loops on the ice to display their control. The young skater found herself much more suited to the free-skating programs, where skaters must perform a number of required moves, but do so to music and creative choreography. The score for each category is an average of the scores from nine judges, with 6.0 being the highest. Witt skated in her first European championship in 1979 at age 14 and placed tenth. The next year, she placed fifth. In 1982, she won both the short and long programs, and finished second overall.

Witt entered her first Olympic competition in 1984 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. She placed third in the compulsories. Witt was nonplussed by the cheering American crowd, and skated confidently onto the ice wearing a traditional Hungarian costume. Skating fans used to the stern and masculine character of most Eastern bloc athletes were not prepared for Witt's personality and charm. A virtually perfect performance gave her 5.8s and 5.9s among the judges in the long and short programs. American Rosalyn Sumners scored almost as well. The fight ended narrowly: Witt won the gold medal over Sumners by just one-tenth of a point on one judge's scorecard.