Legendary Winter Olympians

A number of athletes in the 2002 Winter Games are on their way to becoming Olympic legends - luger Georg Hackl to name one. The athletes featured here, like Hackl, were able to transcend the realm of sports and become symbols of dedication and success. A rare combination of natural talents, rigorous training and a healthy dose of charisma has helped them not only reach the medals podium, but to become superstars and role models. The legendary Winter Olympians featured here are a mere sampling of the individual success stories that have made Germany a powerhouse in Winter Games competition over the decades.

Rosi Mittermaier - Alpine Skiing
Jens Weissflog - Ski Jumping
Katarina Witt - Figure Skating


Rosi Mittermaier

"Gold Rosi" had much to smile about in 1976.

Her feat at that Winter Games was so impressive that British journalists dubbed them"The Rosi Games." Her triumph that year didn't stop at the Olympics; she went on to win the overall World Cup title, the first German to do so. After that smashing season, "Gold Rosi" gave up world cup competitive skiing and in 1980 married slalom champion Christian Neureuther. They have two children.

A three-time Olympian, Mittermaier is now a member of the German National Olympic Committee. German sports fans can still see the native of Reit im Winkl regularly as she comments on televised ski events, endorses products and develops Erbacher ski products for the company she and her husband co-own.

Weissflog called the Lillehammer Games the highlight of his career.

Sven Hannawald may have soared into ski-jumping history this year as the winner of all four competitions in ski-jumping Four Hills Tournament, but his forerunner Jens Weissflog remains the only ski-jumper ever to win the Four Hills title four times. His international career spanned three decades, and he won Olympic gold for the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and later for the unified Germany. In the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, Weissflog took the gold on the 70-meter normal hill and won the silver on the 90-meter large hill. Ten years later in Lillehammer, he won Olympic gold on the large hill and helped the by then unified German team to the team gold.

"The Lillehammer Games were the athletic highlight of my life," Weissflog has said. "Every once in a while when I look at the medals of stone set in gold, the memories and wonderful images rise before me. I see in my mind the 130-meter mark underneath me." It was that 130-meter mark - and then some - that Weissflog, the final German jumper in the team competition, would have to surpass if his team was to win a gold medal. He would have to best the remaining Japanese jumper by at least 25 meters, a distance that seemed so impossible to Weissflog that he prematurely congratulated his competitor before taking off on his last jump. His 135.5 meters was more than enough to beat Masahiko Harada's 97.5 meters, and the German's tiumphed.

In between his Olympic successes, Weissflog was normal hill world champion in 1985 and 1989. His Four Hills victories came in 1984, 1985, 1991 and 1996. And his national victories span reunification - he was GDR champion five times and German champion three times.

Weissflog grew up in Pöhla, Saxony. He began practicing ski-jumping at age six on a home-made hill because he was too little to trudge up the real hill, which had no lift at the time. His first jumps were only four meters in distance, a far cry from the more than 130 meters he jumped in his final Olympics appearance. Weissflog retired from ski jumping in 1996, and today, at age 37, stays busy as a television sports commentator, product endorser and with his wife, owner of an apartment hotel in the resort town of Oberwiesenthal in the Erz mountains. He is an avid golfer, pursuing a sport he took up while still on the World Cup circuit.

Witt's 1988 Carmen program became her signature.

It was with her gold-medal win in 1988 that she skated onto the world stage as the tempestuous Carmen, her signature program. One of her rivals that year, America's Debi Thomas, skated to music from the same score, but Witt seemed to embody the heroine's beguiling persona. Of that performance she said, "I danced as if in a dream. Then the thunderous applause. I knew before the scoring, 'Now you are very close to your second Olympic win.'"

Her other athletic triumphs include four World Championship titles in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988; and six European Championship titles from 1983 through 1988.

Since turning pro in 1988, Witt has become an audience favorite with ice shows that tour the United States. She is currently with Target Stars on Ice. And she has used her considerable media clout to bring high-caliber ice shows to German venues. But Witt has also branched out into acting and modeling. With her 1989 "Carmen on Ice" television special, Witt successfully parlayed her rink routine into a popular special that also won an Emmy. She played herself in the 1996 Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire, and in 1998 she played a Russian figure skater in the movie Ronin with Robert DeNiro. Also in 1998 Witt caused a sensation by posing for Playboy magazine. She has served as a figure skating commentator on both US and German television. After growing up in the eastern German Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, the 36-year-old today divides her time between her home in Berlin and the US stops on her busy touring schedule.

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Germany at the Olympics

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Medal Contenders 2002
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