Christian Schenk (athlete)

Christian Schenk
Christian Schenk (left) in 1989 in conversation with Ulf Timmermann
nation	Germany
birthday	9th February 1965 (age 55)
place of birth	Rostock , Germany
Career
End of career	1994
Medal table
Olympic medals 1 × 0 × 0 × World championships 0 × 0 × 1 × European championships 0 × 0 × 1 ×
Olympic games gold 1988 Seoul Decathlon World championships bronze Tokyo 1991 Decathlon European championships bronze Split 1990 Decathlon
last change: November 16, 2018

Christian Schenk (born February 9, 1965 in Rostock ) is a former German athlete who - starting for the GDR - won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1988 Olympic Games . He admits in his autobiography that he knowingly doped with Oral-Turinabol .

Athletic career

Christian Schenk is the son of the former GDR hurdler champion, Eberhard Schenk (1929–2010), and was encouraged to do sports at pre-school age. After getting too big as a gymnast, he switched to athletics in 1975 and began decathlon in 1982.

He won the silver medal at the Junior European Championships in 1983 . In the following year, Schenk achieved over 8,000 points (8043 points) for the first time when he was fourth in the GDR championships. In 1985 he finished second with the GDR team at the European decathlon cup . In 1987 he was fifth at the World Championships in Rome (8304 points) and won the European Decathlon Cup with the GDR team.

Schenk achieved his greatest success in 1988 with his victory at the Olympic Games in Seoul . His high jump performance of 2.27 m is the greatest height jumped in a decathlon to date. He achieved it as the only straddle jumper in competition and was thus possibly the last significant interpreter of this jumping technique. For his Olympic victory in 1988 he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

In Split, Schenk won the bronze medal at the 1990 European Championships with 8433 points and also at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo he was third (8394 points). At the Olympic Games in 1992 he was unable to take part in the decisive qualifying competition due to an injury. The following year, he set his personal best at the World Championships in Stuttgart with 8500 points and came fourth. In 1994 he ended his sports career, in which he was GDR runner-up in 1985, 1987 and 1990 and German champion in 1991 and 1993.

Christian Schenk started for SC Empor Rostock during the GDR era and trained with Klaus-Gerhard Schlottke. After the end of the GDR, he moved to USC Mainz . He trained under Axel Schaper and Holger Schmidt and was a co-founder of the decathlon team. In the documents on state doping in the GDR that became public after the reunification , the name of Schenk was found among the doped athletes. After the end of the GDR, he came through numerous voluntary doping controls. In September 2018 the autobiography "Riss - My Life Between Hymn and Hell" by the then 53-year-old was published, in which he wrote:

“ At first I denied that I had ever used prohibited drugs. Then I put together the legally somewhat softer answer that I would never have knowingly doped. Both were a lie. I was doping and I knew I was dope. Perhaps not the latter from the beginning, but it hadn't taken long before I realized that these were means that it was better not to talk about. "

- Christian Schenk

Despite his admission that he had doped, the IOC decided that Schenk could keep his Olympic medal as the statute of limitations had expired.

Life

Donate in 2014

During his athletic career, Christian Schenk began studying medicine and later switched to journalism at the University of Mainz . After three years at ZDF Sports, he founded his agency for sports and health marketing as well as incentives in Berlin in 1996 . On November 1, 2016, the entrepreneur expanded his field of work and became managing director of CS&P GmbH in Berlin.

Schenk initiated and led a. a. the Sporthilfe Elite Forum at Castle and Gut Liebenberg. In 2010 he designed the first career and study orientation program Know Your Strengths for schoolchildren and trainees. The program will u. a. Funded by the IHK Berlin and the Berlin Senate for Education.

He has been suffering from bipolar disorder since 2009, which he also reports on in the above. Autobiography. He does not rule out that the disease is a result of the steroid doping administered during the GDR era.

He is the patron of the Alliance against Depression of the Hanseatic City of Rostock and is involved in the Sportler Association for Organ Donation / Children's Aid Organ Transplantation

Christian Schenk has been the official ambassador for SOS Children's Villages since 2012 . In 2011 he took part in the “B2Run” and “Children run for children” on behalf of SOS. In 2012 he organized an SOS Olympiad with the children at the SOS holiday camp in Caldonazzo. He supports the SOS Children's Villages worldwide in the press and on TV.

He has been a board member of the Herzenswunsch Foundation since 2016 .

Christian Schenk is divorced, has two sons and lives in Bergen on the island of Rügen . One of his sons is the former soccer player and today's coach Arvid Schenk (* 1989).

literature

• Zurgams agency (ed.): Zeitsprunge. 35 years of the Mösle all-around meeting in Götzis . Bucher Verlag, Hohenems 2009, ISBN 978-3-902679-23-9 .
• Klaus Gallinat, Olaf W. Reimann:  Schenk, Christian . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Klaus Amrhein: Biographical manual on the history of German athletics 1898–2005 . 2 volumes. Darmstadt 2005 published on German Athletics Promotion and Project Society.
• Fred Sellin, Christian Schenk: Riss - My life between hymn and hell . September 2018

Web links

Commons : Christian Schenk  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Christian Schenk in the database of World Athletics (English)
• Christian Schenk in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )
• Christian Schenk - In vain search for an ideal world (book review)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ with 8488 points; Individual performances: 11.25 s - 7.43 m - 15.48 m - 2.27 m - 48.90 s - 15.13 s - 49.28 m - 4.70 m - 61.32 m - 4:28 , 95 min
2. ↑ Neues Deutschland , 12./13. November 1988, p. 4
3. ^ Brigitte Berendonk : Doping. From research to fraud . Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-18677-2 , p. 183
4. ↑ "Life between Hymn and Hell" - Give proud of Olympic gold - despite doping (September 4, 2018)
5. ^ Confession in biography - Olympic champion Schenk: "I doped" . In: sportbild.de . ( bild.de [accessed on August 28, 2018]).
6. ↑ Olympic champion Schenk admits doping
7. ↑ Schenk is allowed to keep Olympic gold. NDR , August 30, 2018, accessed September 4, 2018 . 
8. ^ IOC: Christian Schenk's case is statute-barred - could strengthen the fight against doping. www.leichtathletik.de, August 30, 2018, accessed September 4, 2018 . 
9. ↑ Christian Schenk: Between doping and depression
10. ↑ Christian Schenk's engagements on sos-kinderdoerfer.de
11. ↑ Heart's Wish Foundation. www.ein-herzenswunsch.de, 2018, accessed on September 4, 2018 .