The West German attack (daily newspaper Junge Welt)

When Kathrin Boron mutated into a national squad on New Year’s Day 1991 like 1,499 other top athletes from the GDR, the then 21-year-old had already passed a major personal turning point. A few months after her enrollment at the German University for Physical Culture (DHfK) in Leipzig, the wall had come down in November 1989. After that, the world rowing champion from 1989 and 1990 immediately began to ponder. Was your career goal as a trainer or sports teacher still the right one? From then on, this path seemed fraught with too many question marks and imponderables. Without further ado, the young woman, who had been junior world champion in 1986 and 1987, gave up her studies. She started a commercial apprenticeship. And precisely at Deutsche Bank at home in Potsdam, she found a company where she could combine competitive sport, training and then professional life.

“As a top athlete in the GDR, you were very well looked after, you didn’t have to worry about anything – and then it broke away from one day to the next,” Boron recalls 30 years later. She is proud that she took her fate into her own hands after the political upheaval. The bank supported her as a “sponsor without a logo” until the end of her sports career. Boron won Olympic gold four times in a row and bronze at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

If top sport allowed it, the athlete had to work in her bank branch, half or full day at the counter. In return, the employer paid her full wages if she was unable to work due to sports. When she needed a break, when the body came forward, when she became a mother in 2002 and took a break from top-class sport, “one conversation” was enough to find uncomplicated solutions. At the end of a career with a total of ten World Cup titles, there was a financially secured »orientation phase« on top of that as a bonus.

But actually, over the years, Boron wanted to “do something in sports”. Since 2015 she has been working at the German Sports Aid Foundation as an athlete manager. She looks after athletes, speed skaters, short trackers and curlers and also takes care of everything that has to do with a »dual career«. She is very familiar with the dual nature of sport and vocational training. With her experience, she is a good contact person for the current squad athletes. For her work in the promotion of athletes, she even did something that she “could never have imagined before”: She left her beloved Brandenburg lake district and moved to the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main.

Despite the change in the political system 30 years ago: From a purely sporting point of view, everything stayed the same for Kathrin Boron. The East German scullers were “clearly superior” to the West German ones and even internationally the measure of all things. The East German Jutta Lau remained her trainer, Boron mostly trained in the local area in Potsdam, the boathouse in Pirschheide remained the same.

But a painful change only followed after the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Suddenly the German Rowing Association (DRV) forced Boron and the successful East German rowers to use a new technique. Instead of leading the two skulls above and past each other by the handles in front of the belly as usual “right before left” at a distance of a few millimeters, the upper ends of the two oars now had to cross “left before right”. The West German “encroachment” was proclaimed the standard method and thus the era of successful GDR technology ended.

Scars on their hands remind Boron of this change. “It was like learning to row again for us. Changing automated motion sequences over the years is extremely difficult, «says the 51-year-old. But she knows she got through the system change much better than most of the GDR population: “We athletes were taken on without any restrictions, there were no compromises. In terms of funding, we were absolutely equal to the athletes from the old federal cadres. That was probably the only area in the east for which one can say something like that. “