Frank Thomas

Witt Notable Sports Figures
Katarina Witt
Witt emerged as a natural talent, and was approached
by an East German athlete training school. In
former Communist nations like East Germany and the
Soviet Union, promising athletes were hand-picked by
the government, and then were provided training so that
they would grow up to perform favorably for their
country in competition. Standards for these programs
were rigid, and once entry into a state school was
gained, the training regimen was strict and demanding.
Before a child was offered a place in a training program,
every detail of her and her family’s physical and
behavioral nature was measured and calculated to determine
their champion potential. A child who showed
a tendency toward heaviness would not be allowed into
the program, so Witt’s parents were weighed and measured.
Officials observed Witt during practice to determine
her ability to resist signs of stress or nerves. Witt
stood up to the testing with remarkable poise and was
accepted into the sports school.
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
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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
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