BAnnual press conferences of the German team at the end of the summer games are usually sober numbers games with a tendency to gossip. On Saturday it was first about the human and the inhuman. The President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB), Alfons Hörmann, attacked the world association of pentathletes, led by compatriot Klaus Schormann. On Saturday afternoon, local time, he spoke of “unacceptable” rules and “blatant deficiencies in regulation” before he pronounced a kind of suspension for national coach Kim Raisner: no appearance at the competition in the afternoon for her “protection”.
Raisner had asked her desperate, gold course, athlete Annika Schleu in front of the camera to whip the horse, which was completely frightened in the jumping course, and hit the animal on the backside. A terrible shit storm hit the rider and trainer. The world federation later withdrew Raisner’s accreditation and chased it away with disgrace and shame for behavior that he, with his eyesight, provoked.
Hörmann, head of the German delegation, at the final of the games, unwittingly and indirectly, once again pointed out the eternal conflict. On the dependence on athletes in the sports systems, on the tremendous pressure of having to meet one’s own expectations, but also those of others. Who is strong enough to know what to do, and above all what not to do, at the decisive moment?
Before the games, Hörmann had repeatedly given the impression that the number of medals was not the most important thing. He liked to talk about a fair play rating, about the good impression that his “Team D” should make. They did, he declared on Saturday: “Great ambassadors.” Unfortunately not all of them. One derailment of cycling official Patrick Moster was enough to put the 430 Germans in a bad light for days. He called professional cyclists from Eritrea and Algeria “camel drivers”. Hörmann viewed this discrimination on Saturday, a good ten days after the incident, as “racist statements”.
He himself had initially wanted to keep Moster in the team and only understood a day later, under pressure from the International Olympic Committee, that this case could not be surpassed in terms of clarity at the moment it was called during the street race. What are these messages to those chosen to be ambassadors of the good? Fatal. The perception of sport officials will also strengthen the cliché in Germany and, in retrospect, provoke the following question: Wouldn’t it have been better to ban officials from visiting and to let the Japanese into the stadiums of the games that they paid for and organized so brilliantly?
It will depend on the naturally existing quality of German sports designers to draw the right conclusions from the most recent performance record. There are 37 medals, ten gold, eleven silver and 16 bronze. Without the complex organization of top-class sport, this would hardly have been possible, not even where professionals like the first German Olympic champion in tennis, Alexander Zverev, have long emerged from the classic German funding system. The majority of the Olympic participants are state athletes, supported by the armed forces and police at the federal and state levels.
And yet Dirk Schimmelpfennig, responsible for top-class sport on the DOSB board, had to admit the continuation of a trend: “The result is comparable to that of Rio, a little weaker.” With two exceptions, the precious metal yield has continuously declined: from 82 to 65 (Atlanta 1996) to 56 (Sydney 2000), 49 (Athens 2004), 41 (Beijing 2008) now to 37. The results would certainly have been partially corrected if there had been intensive follow-up tests for doping back then.
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