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Katarina Witt
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Katarina Witt is a German figure skater, born on December 3, 1965, in the German city of Staaken. Katarina won two Olympic gold medals, 1984 in the Sarajevo Olympics and the second in 1988 at the Calgary Olympics. She won the world championships in 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1988. She gained a lot of attention when she posed for Playboy Magazine in 1998.
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In 1984, Katarina Witt was voted "GDR female athlete of the year" by the readers of the East German newspaper junge Welt. She narrowly won the 1984 Olympic title over the favored contender, reigning World champion Rosalynn Sumners of the United States. Witt and Sumners held the top two spots heading into the Olympic free skate, worth 50% of the total score. Witt landed three triple jumps in her free skate program (or long program), and the judges left room for Sumners to win the event, but Sumners scaled back two of her jumps, and Witt won the long program by one tenth of a point on one judge's scorecard.
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At the 1984 Sarajevo Games, Katarina Witt won the women's figure skating gold medal by defeating two world champions, Rosalynn Sumners and Elaine Zayak. In fact, Witt is the only woman to win an Olympic singles championship after placing lower than second in the previous year's world championship (she was fourth). Witt's victory was a narrow one. In the free skating stage, she won the first place votes of five judges, while four voted for Sumners. Four years later in Calgary, Witt won an even tighter contest. She actually lost the free skate to Elizabeth Manley, but earned the gold medal based on her performances in the compulsory figures and the short program.
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Known as "Fire on the Ice," Katarina Witt emerged from the former East Germany to become the winningest figure skater since Norway's Sonja Henie. Witt made an enormous splash onto the international scene in the 1988 Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where she took her first gold medal. Sexy and charming as well as technically astute and creatively expressive, she instantly became a media darling. All told, she earned two Olympic gold medals, four World Championship gold medals, and was European champion eight times.
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Katarina Witt was born in Staaken in then-East Germany, just outside of West Berlin, which is today part of Berlin. She went to school in Karl-Marx-Stadt (which today has reverted to its pre-war name of Chemnitz). There she attended a special school for sports-talented children, named Kinder- und Jugendsportschule. She represented the club SC Karl-Marx-Stadt for the GDR (East Germany). Jutta Müller began coaching her in 1977.
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Katarina Witt was born on December 3rd, 1965, in Staaken, East Germany. Her father, Manfred, managed an agricultural products factory, while her mother, Kathe, was a physical therapist. Rounding out the Witt family was Katarina's brother Axel... an athlete, who trained to be a physical therapist like his mother. Coincidentally, Axel would later marry Anett Potzsch, the 1980 Olympic figure skating gold medalist, who was a pupil of Katarina's skating coach.
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Katarina Witt