Jan Behrendt

Jan Behrendt
nation	German Democratic Republic of Germany
birthday	November 29, 1967
place of birth	Ilmenau
size	168 cm
Weight	70 kg
Career
discipline	Two-seater
society	ASK Vorwärts Oberhof WSV Oberhof 05 BSR Rennsteig Oberhof
Trainer	Bernd Jäger, Norbert Hahn
National squad	since 1986
status	resigned
End of career	1998
Medal table
Olympic medals 2 × 1 × 1 × World Cup medals 7 × 4 × 0 × EM medals 2 × 0 × 2 ×
winter Olympics silver Calgary 1988 Two-seater gold Albertville 1992 Two-seater bronze Lillehammer 1994 Two-seater gold Nagano 1998 Two-seater  Luge World Championships gold Winterberg 1989 Two-seater silver Winterberg 1989 team gold Winterberg 1991 Two-seater gold Winterberg 1991 team gold Calgary 1993 Two-seater gold Calgary 1993 team gold Lillehammer 1995 Two-seater gold Lillehammer 1995 team silver Altenberg 1996 team silver Igls 1997 Two-seater silver Igls 1997 team
Placements in the Luge World Cup
World Cup victories 27  Overall World Cup DS 1. (93/94, 94/95, 95/96)
last change: April 4, 2010

Jan Behrendt (born November 29, 1967 in Ilmenau ) is a former German luge athlete who initially competed for the GDR and from 1990 for the reunified Germany.

Behrendt achieved his greatest successes in the two-seater as "Untermann" with his partner Stefan Krauße . Krauße and Behrendt quickly rose to the top of the international league and won four Olympic medals between 1988 and 1998, including two Olympic victories (1992 and 1998). There were also seven world and two European championships as well as 27 world cup victories and three first places in the overall world cup, which made the duo the most successful doubles of the 1990s.

Career

Beginnings and first participation in the Olympics (until 1988)

When he started school in 1974, Behrendt met his future partner in the two-seater, Stefan Krauße , who was two months older . Four years later, the two people from Ilmenau started tobogganing, each starting in a single-seater. It was not until 1982 that they switched to the two-seater together and from then on formed a team, with Behrendt, who was 18 centimeters smaller and around 20 kilograms lighter, taking on the role of "under man". Later, Krauße, who was responsible for the controls as the “pilot”, justified the decision to form a team with the fact that they were very similar due to their reserved temperament. Even after the 16-year relationship, which was referred to in the media as the “athlete's marriage”, Krauße and Behrendt remained friends and kept in touch because they both lived in the same place.

Behrendt's partner Stefan Krauße (third from left) in 1985

The 17-year-olds contested their first international competition in 1985 at the European Junior Championships on the combined artificial ice rink at Königssee , where they won the bronze medal together. A year later, the two tobogganers achieved the same placement at the Junior World Championships, which was also held at Königssee. Within a few years, the doubles had established themselves in the national top, which also included the duo Jörg Hoffmann and Jochen Pietzsch . Hoffmann and Pietzsch, who, like Krauße and Behrendt, competed for the successful GDR club ASK Vorwärts Oberhof , had become world champions three times in a row between 1983 and 1987 and were therefore high favorites for the Olympic title, which was awarded in Calgary in 1988 . In fact, Hoffmann and Pietzsch won the Olympic competition, followed by Krauße and Behrendt second. At a press conference after the Olympic Games, Jörg Hoffmann praised the achievements of the 20-year-old Olympic debutants and said that they could one day be their successors. Krauße and Behrendt then declared that they could have learned "a lot" from the Olympic champions during the training sessions.

Establishment among the world's best and first Olympic victory (1988 to 1994)

In the following Olympics , Krauße and Behrendt replaced the Hoffmann / Pietzsch doubles, who were several years older, as the strongest national - and thus also international - force. In 1989 they became world champions for the first time in Winterberg, and also in 1991 after missing the title in 1990. In addition, after the German reunification , the two tobogganists no longer started for the GDR, but for the reunified Germany. Associated with this was the dissolution of their old club, the ASK Vorwärts Oberhof, in 1990. The successor club was the WSV Oberhof 05 , from which the skating sports division was separated in 1993 as the BSR Rennsteig Oberhof . Thus Krauße and Behrendt competed for three different clubs during their career, although they never changed their location. The new trainer was the German national coach Josef Lenz , who described the duo as a "couple like bad luck and sulfur". In the 1991/92 Olympic season , Krauße / Behrendt initially failed to build on the successes of previous years. The winter was dominated by the South Tyrolean Hansjörg Raffl and Norbert Huber , who had won all the World Cup races and the European Championship and were therefore also favorites for the Olympic Games in Albertville . There, however, this time Krauße and Behrendt won, who in retrospect saw their advantage in the fact that they had pulled their legs and triggered the light barrier a little later.

There were only two years between the 1992 Olympics in Albertville and the subsequent Olympic competitions in Lillehammer , due to the decision not to allow the summer and winter games to take place in the same year, and thus only one world championship, which took place in Calgary in 1993 . Krauße and Behrendt secured the title in the two-seater for the third time within four years and also won - as in 1991 - the team competition in which they represented Germany together with Georg Hackl and Susi Erdmann, among others . After the duo had also competed successfully in the 1993/94 World Cup season and had won four of the six World Cup races as well as the overall World Cup for the first time, Krauße and Behrendt were again among the favorites for the Olympic gold medal in 1994. In Lillehammer, however, they lost to the Italian doubles Kurt Brugger / Wilfried Huber due to a mistake in the second run and only won the bronze medal.

End of career with the second Olympic victory (1994 to 1998)

The Lillehammer Games were followed by another successful Olympiad for the two Ilmenauers, who meanwhile belonged to the older couples in the doubles field. At the national level, they remained the duo with the best results, although the a few years younger Skel / Wöller and Mankel / Rudolph also won medals and triumphed at World Cups. Nevertheless, Krauße and Behrendt were overall World Cup winners both in the 1994/95 season and in the following winter and secured the world championship title in 1995 and the European championship in 1996. This triumph was the first to secure the double in continental competitions, having previously won bronze medals twice. In the pre-Olympic season 1996/97 the double remained untitled; behind the Austrian team Schiegl / Schiegl it reached silver. In the test competition on the Olympic track in Nagano, Krauße and Behrendt were not very successful and placed far behind in the starting field. As a reaction to this, at the beginning of the winter of 1997/98 they had their sled modernized at the Institute for Research and Development of Sports Equipment (FES) in Berlin, but fitted the old runners underneath, with which they had won almost six years earlier in Albertville.

The 1997/98 season was the final for the now 30-year-old athlete. The last career highlight was the Olympic competitions in Nagano, the fourth games in which Krauße and Behrendt participated. Before that, with two more World Cup victories, they set the record for the Italians Hansjörg Raffl and Norbert Huber, who, like the Ilmenau, had won 27 races in the highest competition class. Despite a fall in training in which Stefan Krauße sustained a rib and leg injury, the doubles managed to reconnect to the top of the world before the Olympic Games. The German duo won at the European Championships, but with the Americans Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin, the main competitors for the Olympic Games were missing. In the training runs on the track in Nagano, both Krauße and Behrendt as well as Grimmette and Martin performed well; one of these teams was in the lead on most of the training runs. In the first of two rounds, the Germans immediately took the lead, which they were not displaced in the final run. Looking back on the second round, in the middle part of which Krauße and Behrendt did not drive optimally, Jan Behrendt said that at first he thought it was all over. However, the double was able to compensate for the mistake with a good performance in the last part of the route, so that Krauße and Behrendt became Olympic champions for the second time with a margin of 0.22 seconds.

For his outstanding sporting successes he was honored by being awarded the Silver Laurel Leaf.

Following the Nagano Games, Stefan Krauße and Jan Behrendt retired from active competitive sports. The German national coach Thomas Schwab commented on the end of his career: “You can't win more; as a coach you are almost speechless. ”The athletes themselves explained their decision by saying that there were no more athletic goals. At the same time, they affirmed that it had been a good time. After his resignation, Behrendt, who was made an honorary citizen of the city of Ilmenau a week after the Olympics, continued the training he had begun in 1995 to become a banker . A few years before the end of her career, he was publicly annoyed in a World Cup competition that the two-seaters received less media attention than the single-seaters. The two-seaters would collectively receive 15,000 marks from Deutsche Sporthilfe as prize money for an Olympic medal ; they would even have to share that. The record of 27 World Cup victories that Krauße and Behrendt had set in 1998 was exceeded at the beginning of the 2007/08 season by their compatriots Patric Leitner and Alexander Resch .

successes

World Cup victories

Two-seater

No.	date	place	train
1.	Jan. 10, 1988	Altenberg	Altenberg racing sled and bobsled run
2.	Jan. 17, 1988	Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
3.	0Jan. 8, 1989	Oberhof	Oberhof luge track
4th	Jan. 15, 1989	Koenigssee	Koenigssee artificial ice rink
5.	Jan. 28, 1990	Koenigssee	Koenigssee artificial ice rink
6th	Nov 25, 1990	Altenberg	Altenberg racing sled and bobsled run
7th	0Feb 9, 1991	St. Moritz	Olympia Bobrun St. Moritz – Celerina
8th.	Jan. 31, 1993	Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
9.	0Feb. 7, 1993	Lillehammer	Hunderfossen bobsleigh and sled run
10.	0Dec 2, 1993	Sigulda	Sigulda luge and bobsleigh track
11.	0Dec 5, 1993	Sigulda	Sigulda luge and bobsleigh track
12.	Dec 12, 1993	innsbruck	Igls artificial ice rink bobsleigh
13.	Dec. 19, 1993	Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
14th	Nov. 26, 1994	innsbruck	Igls artificial ice rink bobsleigh
15th	Nov. 27, 1994	innsbruck	Igls artificial ice rink bobsleigh
16.	December 17, 1994	Calgary	Bobsleigh and sled run in Canada Olympic Park
17th	Dec 18, 1994	Calgary	Bobsleigh and sled run in Canada Olympic Park
18th	Jan 15, 1995	Oberhof	Oberhof luge track
19th	Jan. 22, 1995	Koenigssee	Koenigssee artificial ice rink
20th	Dec 10, 1995	La Plagne	La Plagne bobsleigh and sled run
21st	Dec 17, 1995	Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
22nd	Jan. 21, 1996	Koenigssee	Koenigssee artificial ice rink
23.	Feb 11, 1996	St. Moritz	Olympia Bobrun St. Moritz – Celerina
24.	Feb. 17, 1996	Oberhof	Oberhof luge track
25th	0Feb. 2, 1997	Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
26th	0Dec 6, 1997	innsbruck	Igls artificial ice rink bobsleigh
27.	Jan. 18, 1998	Altenberg	Altenberg racing sled and bobsled run

Web links

• Jan Behrendt in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• World class toboggan runner from Ilmenau - Stefan Krauße / Jan Behrendt
• Dieter Hennig: Krauße / Behrendt: "You see each other again over a beer" End of an athlete marriage / 16 years together: "Wanted and found" - detailed report from the Rhein-Zeitung . Released February 13, 1998.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ racing sled. In: Society for the Promotion of the Olympic Thought in the German Democratic Republic (Hrsg.): XV. Olympic Winter Games Calgary 1988. Sportverlag Berlin, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-328-00228-6 , p. 48.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Britta Kruse and Ernst Christian Schütt: German tobogganers clear the medals almost alone in the ice channel. In: Markus Wasmeier (Ed.): Olympic Winter Games Nagano 1998. Chronik Verlag, Gütersloh / Munich 1998, ISBN 3-577-14552-8 , p. 112.
3. ↑ Press release of the BSD (Bobsleigh and Sled Association Germany)
4. ↑ Beggars in the premier class
5. ↑ Leitner / Resch sole record winner after victory in Calgary