German Olympic balance sheet: The main thing is that everyone is healthy – sport


The Tokyo pandemic games cannot only be judged on the basis of the medal table. Whereby: Of course you can – then at the end of the second Olympic week you come to the numbers nine, ten, eleven, 16 and 37, and the catchy conclusion that the German athletes with the worst record since reunification are returning from Japan . A German athlete stood on the podium 37 times, ten of them won gold, eleven silver, 16 bronze. At the end of the day, this means rank nine in the medal ranking. The reunified Germany has never ranked lower than sixth.

But the pandemic games make a little humble even for those who are otherwise not prone to humility. Alfons Hörmann, as President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB), otherwise a diligent accountant of the performance company, wanted to emphasize something else in his balance sheet: that it was also a top achievement “to bring Team D here healthy, to get through the Games healthy.” and bring it home healthy “.

One of the team, the cyclist Simon Geschke, could not be flown out to the quarantine hotel until days after his positive corona test; the story went off lightly. However, it was open on Sunday when Susanne Wiedemann, the sub-team leader of the Modern Pentathlon, could go home. It was (only after Hörmann’s press conference) the second German corona case in Tokyo and had to move from the Olympic village to quarantine.

Schimmelpfennig believes that the Olympic spirit has been recognized – despite mask and distance requirements

Whether it was even right to host these games despite the pandemic – others have to question that. The games were important for the sporting business. Dirk Schimmelpfennig, the competitive sports director of the DOSB, said on Saturday that it was “games for the athletes” – which was true because there was no audience. And after the many months in which parts of the Olympic sport had disappeared in the corona sinking, Schimmelpfennig hopes that the TV broadcasts “will motivate many young athletes again for their path”.

Last Olympic appearance: DOSB President Alfons Hörmann will no longer compete in autumn after criticism of his authoritarian leadership style and an investigation by the ethics committee.

(Photo: Michael Kappeler / dpa)

Schimmelpfennig even spotted the Olympic spirit! This time there was no “German House” as a meeting place. On the other hand, those encounters that make the Olympics take place all the more in the athletes’ village. “There was the Olympic spirit,” said Schimmelpfennig, and despite the mask and distance requirements, “it was recognized”.

The fact that everyone can never be fulfilled by him was another issue in Tokyo. The Germans had to send two team members home early, after derailments that had received international attention. Although one should not compare the cases. The cycling sports director Patrick Moster had to leave because of a racist insult. Kim Raisner, the national trainer for modern pentathlon, did not choose the appropriate words in the drama about a disturbed jumping horse (“Hit it, hit it right”). In both cases it was also irritating how long it took before Hörmann found the halfway right words.

The Germans can do a lot of things quite passably, but almost nowhere are they clearly the best

When all of this has been dealt with soon, you end up back at the medal table and the question of what the declining number of top placements says about the German sports system.

Above all, a look at the figures shows that the Germans can do a lot of things quite passably, but – apart from dressage riding – they are nowhere clearly the best. Japan alone has nine gold medals in judo, the Australians won 20 medals in swimming, and the Chinese won seven of the eight gold medals in diving. In the global sports arsenal, you never know exactly which methods are behind which results.

How far the Chinese are ready to go, however, could be marveled at by the 14-year-old high diver Quan Hongchan, who made the jury reach the dream grade of 10.0 several times, as she completed her jumps with such a robotic perfection. “The brutality” behind these successes worries him, said Hörmann. There are some things that German sport doesn’t have to take part in, even if politicians are now investing more millions in high-performance operations than ever before.

In total, the Germans won medals in 16 sports, compared to 19 in Rio. The fact that there was no team sport this time gives a first indication of what it is suffering from: aspiration and reality are often not in harmony. If the coach Stefan Kuntz can only scrape together 18 instead of the planned 22 footballers at the professional clubs – then you shouldn’t be surprised about an end in the preliminary round.

And with the handball players, Bob Hanning, the Vice President of the Handball Federation, had given the motto “Gold 2020” full-bodied. But while the Egyptians, against whom the German team lost in the quarter-finals, or Olympic champion France were already working on the automatisms in early summer, the league season was still running in Germany. The fact that medals cannot be picked up in passing would be an important first insight.

In many other disciplines, the question arises: Wasn’t the goal of the competitive sports reform that the DOSB and politicians agreed upon in 2016 to achieve the opposite? The words of the then Interior and Sports Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) still linger, according to which Germany, measured in terms of financial commitment, would have to get “a third more medals”. Schimmelpfennig wanted to see the “first effects” of the reform in Tokyo, but the “final implementation” would not begin until 2022, he said.

And then he immediately put the core of the project up for grabs: a detailed “potential analysis” called POTAS should actually make sports funding more comprehensible and more targeted – but it ties up forces in the associations in an almost absurd way. Schimmelpfennig now said that competitive sports management “urgently needs to be unbureaucratised”. So German sport continues to spin in circles.

The insight should be: Make locations strong where it works – and also get know-how from abroad

An example of how in the thicket of full-time and voluntary work, even small successes are often more fragile than they should be, can be seen in swimming. After long years of waiting for an Olympic medal, the Germans won three in Tokyo, two from Florian Wellbrock and one from Sarah Köhler. One of the success stories.

Both swimmers come from the base in Magdeburg, where trainer Bernd Berkhahn is also the team boss of the national swimming team. However, the new board of the DSV swimming association, which took up position at the end of 2020, has not yet considered it necessary to ask in Magdeburg specifically what is necessary in swimming for international success. The four voluntary DSV board members prefer to fill important trainer positions independently, and they also want to decide on the central position of the DSV competitive sports director in the near future. It’s not a concept.

Not only in swimming, but also there, one thing should have long since been: make the locations strong where it works (as German athletics has long understood it) – and for others also get know-how from abroad! But decision-makers often do not dare to approach this topic at all. At the end of the day you still have to speak English with the trainers? Well, that would be asking too much!

The DOSB? Has little use there. The associations are autonomous. And if they do, then power and loyalty are often more important drivers in this business than innovation and attention to detail. How much people are concerned with themselves in the German sports center is also shown by the personnel Alfons Hörmann, who will no longer compete in the autumn after criticizing his authoritarian management style and an investigation by the DOSB ethics committee.

When you asked Hörmann on Saturday in Tokyo which topic he would like to recommend most urgently to a successor in order to preserve the status of sport – then none of them seemed to be on his mind. That would then be discussed directly, he simply said. There will be a clean handover. Even that didn’t sound like the big German sporting breakthrough was to be expected until the next games in Paris in 2024.

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