There is sports reporter Heinz Florian Oertel some great sequences on youtube, the man was a voice of GDR sports, and this voice hummed and growled completely unmistakably, and of course it didn’t hurt the overall impression one bit that Oertel also looked like a kind of Lino Ventura from the press pit at times. Big scene for example from the year 1976, the soccer team of the GDR had just become Olympic champion in Montreal, at Oertel in the studio sat goalkeeper Jürgen Croy and Reinhard Häfner, who had scored the third goal in the final against Poland. While Häfner, a rather reserved person, reported on his heroic deed in sympathetically clumsy words, it was Oertel who ennobled the conversation with his timbre and his characteristic willingness to find daring images and sometimes crooked ones: “You did that brilliantly. And that takes a lot of cold blood, cold nerves. And fabulous technique.”
Heinz Florian Oertel is dead: the voice of GDR sports has died
