Timur Oruz can still date the moment precisely. It was at Easter last year that a process began that he could no longer stop. And I didn’t want to either. Which led him to his decision to skip the Olympic Games – which would have been his third. Oruz ended his national hockey team career at the age of 29 after 115 international matches and six months before the possible Paris gold crown. Which says a lot about this extraordinary athlete. But also about the general conditions that high-performance athletes in marginal disciplines have to cope with – and under what pressure and influences they plan their future after their active career.
In April 2023, Oruz was in action for his club Rot-Weiß Köln in the final tournament of the Euro Hockey League, essentially the Champions League of field hockey. As he “shuffled across a hotel corridor” tired and drained, as he says, he asked himself why exactly he was there. “I never had such a thought. I have played countless Bundesliga games, have been playing in the senior squad for ten years and have played through all the U national teams before that – hockey has always been the main part of my life. That day was the first signal to me that something seems to be changing. That priorities shift, that a phase of life ends,” says Oruz.
