Welcome to 90’s Figure Skating’s athlete profiles! This series aims to introduce new fans to athletes from this time period, in addition to helping established fans find out something new about their favourite skaters.
For the first entry in this series, I have chosen to focus on my own personal favourite skater, Katarina Witt. The only woman alive who has won consecutive Olympic gold medals in the ladies’ singles discipline, Katarina’s star power and charisma transcended the sport and made her one of the most recognisable faces in skating throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
Early Life
Katarina Witt was born in Falkensee, East Germany on 3rd December 1965. At the age of five, she was inducted into the Karl-Marx Stadt sports club due to the promise she showed in the sport of figure skating and joined a KJS (Kinder und Jungend Sportschulen: Children and Youth Sports Schools) at the age of nine. Promising young athletes who attended a KJS in East Germany experienced an intense, all-consuming educational process, spending around 50 to 60 hours on average in classes and training, with almost half of this time dedicated to physical activity and sport alone.
In 1977, Katarina began her partnership with Jutta Müller, one of East Germany’s most successful figure skating coaches. Müller coached many Olympic medallists throughout her career, including her own daughter, Gabriele ‘Gaby’ Seyfert, who won a silver medal in 1968. Some of her other successful students include Jan Hoffmann, who won silver in 1980, and Annett Pötzsch, who won gold in the same year.
When Katarina turned eleven, she was placed with the older skaters in the group, all of whom could perform triple jumps. She was placed in this group to push her training even further, encouraged by the fact that she was skating with teenagers who were a lot better at this stage from a technical viewpoint. Soon, she began to garner recognition at international competitions, and her success as a competitive skater truly began.
Competitive Career
By 1981, Katarina was achieving strong placements in international competition. At the 1981 World Championships, she placed 1st in the short program and 3rd in the long program, but unfortunately missed out on a medal due to a low placement in the compulsory figures. The following year, she earned her first medal in a major competition, placing second at the 1982 European Championships.
Despite promising results at German Nationals and the European Championships earlier in the season, Katarina did not go into the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in 1984 as the clear favourite to walk away with the gold medal. Her main competitor was Rosalynn Sumners of the USA, who had won the World Championships the previous year. The competition was extremely close in 1984 coming into the long program, with Sumners placing first in the compulsory figures, worth 30 per cent of the overall mark, but fifth in the short program, worth 20 per cent. In comparison, Witt came third in compulsory figures and first in the short program, meaning that she went into the long program, worth 50 per cent, slightly ahead of Sumners. Whoever won the long program would therefore walk away with the gold medal, and Katarina eventually prevailed by one tenth of a point. The same year, she won her first World Championships in Ottowa, Canada.
Rosalynn Sumners retired from competitive skating following the 1984 Olympics, but Katarina continued her amateur career. In 1985 she dominated the ladies’ singles discipline, winning both the European Championships and World Championships for the second time. She triumphed at Europeans once again in 1986, but in a surprising upset, she came second to Debi Thomas of the USA at the World Championships. However, she reclaimed her title the following year in Cincinnati. This was the beginning of an exciting rivalry in the lead up to the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
The rivalry was exacerbated by the fact that both women chose to skate their long program in Calgary to music from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, leading the media to dub the rivalry as ‘The Battle of the Carmens.’ The women’s long program was one of the most viewed events of the Calgary Olympics, with millions tuning in to see which Carmen would prevail. Debi Thomas chose to skate to more exciting, upbeat pieces of music from the opera, whereas Katarina skated to more dramatic pieces, including the climax of the opera where Carmen is killed by her jealous lover.
Compulsory figures went well for both athletes, with Thomas going into the short program in second place and Witt just behind her in third. Witt won the short program with Thomas in second, placing Thomas first overall and Witt second going into the long program. Therefore, whichever Carmen the judges preferred would walk away with the gold medal. Katarina was the first of the two to skate, and only executed four of her five planned triple jumps. She had left the door open slightly for Thomas, who was a technically superior skater.
Debi Thomas, however, appeared shaken by the momentous occasion when standing with her coach at the boards. They had a ritual, in which right before each performance they would high five with both hands. On this occasion, Debi Thomas missed his hands, and fell on her first triple-triple combination jump in her program. She ended up missing three triple jumps in total, along with some other mistakes. Thomas ended up in third place overall, with Elizabeth Manley of Canada claiming the silver medal and Katarina Witt winning her second back-to-back Olympic gold medal, the first woman to do so since Sonja Henie in the 1930s.
This exact podium was repeated at the World Figure Skating Championships in Budapest the following month, which was to be Katarina’s last amateur skating competition. She would go on to have an extremely successful career as a professional skater in the late 1980s and early 1990s, despite the restrictions placed on East German athletes by the socialist government for fear of defection.
In anticipation of the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, however, Katarina announced her intentions to return to competitive skating following a rule change by the ISU which allowed professional skaters to compete alongside amateurs for the first time. Katarina joined fellow Olympic gold medallists Brian Boitano, pair skaters Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, and ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, all of whom returned to competitive skating in Lillehammer. Katarina stated that her main intentions for returning were so that her parents could watch her compete, as they had not been permitted to travel to watch her in Sarajevo or Calgary. She also wanted to compete for a united Germany, and experience the magic of the Olympic Games one last time without the pressure of winning a medal.
Katarina also wanted to use the Lillehammer Olympics to raise awareness of the plight of war-torn Sarajevo, the place of first Olympic triumph in 1984. She skated her long program to Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ a famous anti-war song. Seeger himself granted Witt permission to use the piece, which had to be completely rearranged in order to be able to work as a competitive skating piece of music. The piece included original explosion noises from television coverage of Sarajevo, and Witt’s vocals at the beginning of the number.
At the Lillehammer Olympics, Katarina Witt skated her short program flawlessly, and placed sixth in the standings going into the long program. She had not expected to place this high, but pressure took over in the long program. Falling or stumbling on three of her triple jumps, Katarina was devastated by her mistakes, despite rapturous applause and a standing ovation from the audience. She placed seventh overall in Lillehammer, with Lu Chen of China winning the bronze medal, Nancy Kerrigan of the United States winning silver, and Oksana Baiul of Ukraine winning gold.
Post-Competitive Career
Following her retirement from competitive skating in 1988, Katarina first toured as a guest with the Holiday on Ice tour, before undertaking a headline North American tour alongside fellow Olympic champion, Brian Boitano. Choreographed and produced by Sandra Bezic, the Boitano/Witt tour was a huge success, and ran for two more years in 1990 and 1991, before being bought over by IMG and amalgamated into the equally successful Stars on Ice tour.
Witt, Boitano and Bezic also collaborated on the TV specials Canvas of Ice and Carmen on Ice, the latter of which won Witt, Boitano and fellow co-star Brian Orser Emmy awards for their efforts. Whilst filming Carmen on Ice in Spain in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, adding to the hugely personal significance of the project for Katarina. These specials helped to bring figure skating to a wider audience and contributed to the sport’s ever-growing popularity in this period.
In the aftermath of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, the popularity of figure skating, particularly in North America, reached fever pitch. Katarina toured with Stars on Ice for several years, in addition to taking part in multiple televised professional skating competitions. Despite the fact that she did not have the same competitive success as a professional that she enjoyed as an amateur, Katarina remained one of the biggest crowd pleasers in both competitions and on tour throughout the 1990s.
Katarina starred in the German film The Ice Princess (1995) alongside her 1984 Olympic competitor, Rosalynn Sumners. She had popular cameos in the films Jerry Maguire (1996) and Ronin (1998), in addition to the TV show Jerry Maguire, highlighting her popularity and ability to transcend the sport in the 1990s.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Katarina produced and starred in multiple of her own TV specials, such as Divas on Ice and Kisses on Ice. She also produced several skating specials back home in Germany, and helped to bring the Stars on Ice tour to Europe for the first time in 1997. Katarina’s hugely successful professional career culminated with her 8-city farewell tour in Germany in 2008, 24 years after she won her first Olympic medal in Sarajevo.
Where are they now?
Since her retirement from professional skating, Katarina has focused much of her time on her charity, which she established in 2005. The Katarina Witt Foundation with a particular focus on sport projects, the foundation “aspires to help, encourage and lend support to children with disabilities.” In addition to her own foundation, Katarina is also a member of the Laureus Sport for Good foundation, which seeks to support disadvantaged children throughout the world through various sports projects.
Katarina has also been a frequent face on both German and international television screens. In 2012 she was a judge on Dancing on Ice in the UK, and on the German version in 2019. She regularly contributes to German broadcaster ARD as a figure skating expert and commentator and travelled to the Sochi 2014 and Pyeonchang 2018 Olympics as part of the official ARD team. Katarina has been the subject of the 2013 documentary The Diplomat, part of the Nine for IX documentary series, and the 2020 documentary Katarina Witt: Weltstar aus der DDR (Katarina Witt: World Star from the DDR).
A film about Katarina’s 1994 return to competition is currently in post-production, directed by Michaela Kezele and starring Lavinia Nowak as Katarina and Dagmar Manzel as Jutta Müller. She also owns a boutique fitness studio Kurvenstar, located in Potsdam, Germany.
