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Katarina Witt: East Germany
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Katarina Witt was the dominant female figure skater of the 1980s, winning gold medals for East Germany in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Witt's sex appeal and talent made her a natural for capitalist success. In the 1990s she made the full transition from skating star to international heartthrob, acting in movies like Ronin (1998, with Robert DeNiro) and posing nude for Playboy magazine.
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Katarina Witt first hit the ice at age 5, and after more than a decade of hard work and training, she took international figure skating by storm. She won many consecutive European and World Championship titles in the 1980s and brought home the gold medal for her native East Germany in the 1984 and 1988 Winter Olympics.
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German figure skater and multi Olympic medal winner, Katarina Witt was born on December 3, 1965. She was affectionately called ‘Kati’ or ‘Kat’ in Germany and was voted as ‘The GDR Female Athlete of the Year’ in a German newspaper, by the readers of ‘Junge Welt’. Katarina Witt won her first Olympic gold medal in 1984, and reaffirmed her status as the best female figure skater, in the succeeding Olympics of 1988 by winning the gold again. She won her first figure skating competition on her seventh birthday, a victory she claimed as her birthday gift to herself.
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Witt (pronounced "Vitt") was born December 3, 1965, in the city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, in the former East Germany, which is now known as Chimnitz, Germany. Her father, Manfred, managed an agriculture factory and her mother, Kathe, was a physical therapist. She has an older brother, Axel. Witt started kindergarten when she was five, and her walk to school took her past the Kuchwald ice arena. She became fascinated with watching the figure skaters, and soon insisted to her parents that she be allowed to join them. Every detail of Witt's first wobbly steps onto the ice would remain in her memory.
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In 1988, Witt started a professional career, which was very unusual for East German athletes. At first she spent three years on tour in the United States with Brian Boitano... a gold medalist in figure skating. Their show "Witt and Boitano Skating" was so successful that for the first time in ten years, New York's Madison Square Garden was sold out for an ice show. Later she continued at Holiday on Ice in the United States and in Western Europe.
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Witt was born on Dec. 3, 1965, in Staaken, East Germany, and began skating by the age of five. By age nine she was already skating under the guidance of renowned East German coach Jutta Muller, and by age 11 she had landed her first triple jump.
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