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Katarina Witt

Gave Her Life To Skating



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.

Chronology

1965 Born December 3 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, former East Germany, now Chimnitz, Germany
1970 Begins skating at Kuchwald ice arena
1974 Begins working with coach Jutta Mueller
1983 Wins first of six consecutive European Championships
1984 Wins first of four World Championships; wins first Olympic gold
1988 Wins second Olympic gold
1988 Appears in American Holiday on Ice tour and in Canvas of Ice program
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall changes her life
1990 Earns Emmy Award for HBO's Carmen on Ice
1992 Covers the Olympics in Albertville, France for CBS-TV
1993 Covers World Championships in Prague for NBC-TV
1993 Returns to Kuchwald ice arena to train for 1994 Olympics
1994 Places seventh at Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway
1994 Moves to New York City and begins skating with professional touring exhibition Stars on Ice
1994 Finishes eighth at European Championships
1995 Takes time off to recover from back injury
1996 The Ice Princess airs on HBO
1996 Appears in Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise
1997-98 Appears on television in Arliss and V.I.P
1998 Appears in Ronin with Robert DeNiro
1998 Appears in top-selling issue of Playboy

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.

Additional topics

Famous Sports StarsFigure SkatingKatarina Witt Biography - Gave Her Life To Skating, Chronology, With Gold Came Celebrity, Held Back By Her Government - CONTACT INFORMATION