Katarina Witt Biography

Four years before Katarina Witt is born, the Berlin Wall cuts her country in half. Even the area she’s born in, Staaken, is sliced in two. Katarina grows up in the Eastern part, under Russian control; a control ruthlessly enforced by the infamous secret police, the Stasi. Like the fascist regime it overthrew, the communist regime places great emphasis on proving its superiority, not just on the field of combat, but in the arena of sport.

Katarina is just five years old when she first takes to the ice, and by seven, she’s won her first competition. Katarina’s parents are poor, even by East German standards, and can’t afford to train her. But one of the world’s most successful figure skating coaches, Jutta Muller, recognises her athletic potential, and starts coaching the nine year old. She’s credited with not just making Katarina technically devastating, but with developing her sense of showmanship. On top of this, Katarina attends a special school for athletes. There, she is weighed twice a day and starved if the results aren’t satisfactory. Skating is now quite literally her life.
Nine gruelling years later, Katarina wins her first European Championship title.

In the winter of 1984, in one of the many classic East versus confrontations of the Cold War, Katarina narrowly takes the Olympic Gold off the reigning American champion, Rosalynn Sumners. (Katarina won by one tenth of one judge’s score card). She also wins her first World Championship title, and that year, readers of the biggest selling news paper in East Germany vote the eighteen year old their country’s athlete of the year.

As her confidence grew, so does the revealing and risky nature of her costumes. Her rigorous routines and technically astute performances seem to contrast with her daring outfits and flirting with the audience. She quickly attracts attention outside of the world of ice skating.
She begins a relationship with a rock drummer. The Stasi try to split the couple up.
In 1985, she again holds onto the World Championship, but loses it the next year, to another American, Debi Thomas. Because Katarina comes second, the East German sports federation write to her reminding her of the necessity of first place.
It was around this time that the Stasi ask her to attend meetings with them. Their job is to make sure she doesn’t defect.

1987 sees her skate the strongest long programme of her career, landing five triple jumps including a triple loop jump to regain the World Championship title.
The following year, she not only recaptured the title, she won her sixth consecutive European Championship, a feat not achieved for over half a century. Along with only one other skater, she has the record for the most consecutive European titles.

The 1988 Calgary Olympics becomes known as the ‘Battle of the Carmens’ after Katarina, and her old rival, Debi Thomas independently choose the same music from the opera Carmen. But both performance aren’t the hyped for spectacles with ‘Time’ magazine describing them as ‘underwhelming’. Despite this, it’s Debi who comes off worse in the clash when costly mistakes mean she only picks up bronze. A triumphant Katarina picks up her second Olympic Gold.

Katarina is now one of the most successful skaters of all time and at the height of her fame, she cashes in and turns professional. It’s unusual for a Soviet state to allow their people to market their skills. It’s even rarer for them to allow them to tour around the country of their great enemy, the United States. But this is what Katarina will do for the next three years. Alongside another gold medallist, she sells out New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time in a decade.

Declassified Stasi files reveal how keen they were to stop their star skater defecting and that the tour, along with other gifts, was part of that effort. But it’s also claimed that she had had to agree to give a substantial portion of her earnings to the East German government.

In October 1989, the Stasi file their last report on her. She’s in Spain, filming a celluloid version of ‘Carmen’. The next month, she returns to Germany to find herself, along with her country, free.

But with her home in East Germany consigned to history, and increasingly unpopular with many of her countryman who accuse her of complicity with the fallen regime, she begins to make New York her new home.
In 1990, Katarina receives an Emmy Award for her starring role in ‘Carmen on Ice’.
Around 1992, she starts a relationship with actor Richard Dean Anderson (of ‘Stargate’ and ‘MacGyver’ fame). It ends that year. Some claim he finishes it after seeing reports of her connection with the Stasi. Katarina denies this.
Her 1993 autobiography reveals she’s seen the Stasi file on her. She details how the Stasi not only recorded when they believed she was having sex, but for how long.
In 1994, Katarina returns to competitive skating, making her debut as a skater for her now re-united country at the Winter Olympics. At that time, Sarajevo was ripping itself apart in a bitter war and in a tribute to the city where she first won gold, she dedicates her performance to it, and enchants the audience: But unfortunately, not the judges, who place her seventh.

Various film and TV roles follow but out of those, few will forget her December 1998 nude appearance in Playboy magazine. The issue is only the second in the magazine’s history to sell out, (the first was the inaugural 1953 edition featuring Marilyn Monroe.)

Much is made of the release of her Stasis files into the public domain in 2002. Many try to paint her as a willing accomplice to one of the worst of the Soviet surveillance states. Critics point to the fact that she received a car ten years ahead of the public waiting list. Others observe that the vehicle she received was not some salubrious sports car, but a Soviet built Lada.

Katarina Witt has a medal tally that makes her one of the most successful figure skaters ever. If she had resisted the Stasi in any way, it’s unlikely the world would have ever heard of her.

She finally came to the attention of the UK public when on her 46th birthday, it was announced that she would be one of the new judges on the ITV series, ‘Dancing On Ice’.