Karin Büttner-Janz

Karin Janz, GDR Olympic team 1972

Karin Janz , married to Karin Büttner-Janz , (born February 17, 1952 in Hartmannsdorf , Lübben (Spreewald) district , now a district of Lübben (Spreewald) ), is a former GDR gymnast and now a doctor. She was two-time Olympic champion at the 1972 Olympic Games (horse jumping and uneven bars), world champion 1970 (uneven bars), four-time European champion and 20-time GDR champion. With a total of 17 international medals, she is the most successful gymnast in German sports history and one of the world's best gymnasts.

After studying medicine, she developed - together with Kurt Schellnack - the first artificial disc, also known as the Charité disc. As a qualified doctor , she managed two clinics, the orthopedic clinic of the Vivantes Clinic Berlin-Friedrichshain and the Clinic for Trauma Surgery and Orthopedics at the Vivantes Clinic Am Urban in Berlin-Kreuzberg .

Life

Athletic career

Karin Janz on the uneven bars at the 1972 Summer Olympics. She won five medals (two gold, two silver and one bronze medal) and was the most successful German athlete.

Karin Büttner-Janz (center, left next to Gunhild Hoffmeister ) at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba in 1978

Up to the age of ten she was trained in gymnastics by her father Guido Janz, a teacher of physics and sports. From 1960 to 1972 she was active as a gymnast at SC Dynamo Berlin (coach: Jürgen Heritz, Werner Pöhland). At 15 she began her international competitive career as an artistic gymnast, she won silver (uneven bars) and bronze (jump) at the European Championships in Amsterdam in 1967 . She was fourth in the all-around competition. In the same year she was elected Sportswoman of the Year in the GDR .

At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City , she won the silver medal on the uneven bars and the bronze medal with the team. At the European Gymnastics Championships in Landskrona in 1969 she was four times European champion. After becoming world champion on uneven bars in 1970 , she was the favorite on this device alongside Olga Korbut at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and won the gold medal. She also won the gold medal in the horse jump and silver in the all-around individual (defeated only by Lyudmila Turishcheva , who was then indomitable ) , silver in the all-around team and bronze on the balance beam. This made her the most successful German athlete. In 1972 she received the medal of Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, the highest sports award in the Soviet Union, and in the same year was elected Sportswoman of the Year in the GDR. After her great success, she announced in early 1973 that she was ending her sports career.

Karin Janz is considered to be " one of the pioneers of active, creative gymnastics " (Götze / Zeume: Flickflack - Weltbühne des Gymnastics, 1987). Her gymnastics lectures were peppered with the most difficult passages, she achieved a high degree of stability on all gymnastics equipment and did gymnastics with technical perfection. She invented numerous gymnastics elements, which later, with her name, were included in the international valuation regulations. The most famous of which is a Grätschsalto forward on the uneven bars, the so-called Janz somersault , which helped her 1972 Olympic gold.

Karin Janz enriched the development of artistic gymnastics for an entire generation and set standards for development trends in the individual pieces of equipment. She was named Gymnast of the Century in 2000 and inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2003. In addition, she received the GDR Patriotic Order of Merit several times for her sporting achievements .

Karin Büttner-Janz 2017 as a guest at the Hall of Fame exhibition in Leipzig

In 2011 Karin Büttner-Janz was inducted into the Hall of Fame of German Sports .

academic career

Karin Büttner-Janz (left in the picture) and Kurt Schellnack (middle) developed a prosthesis for artificial disc replacement at the Charité in the 1980s .

From 1971 to 1978 she studied medicine at the Humboldt University in Berlin ; she wrote her diploma on emergency medicine in the GDR. She then completed her clinical semester at the Charité Orthopedic Clinic . Your choice of specialization fell on the field of orthopedics . She did her PhD in Dr. med. with a dissertation on knee joint diagnostics. 1989 habilitated they Dr. sc. med. on the development of the world's first prosthesis for the complete replacement of a spinal disc , the so-called Charité disc . For this purpose, she registered her first patents in the team from 1984. From 1987 to 1990 she was a senior physician in orthopedics at the Charité Berlin. In 1990 she left the Charité and took over the management of orthopedics at the Hellersdorf Clinic. In 2004, when her clinic moved, she became director of the Orthopedic Clinic at Vivantes Clinic in Friedrichshain. From 2008–2012 she also headed the Clinic for Trauma Surgery and Orthopedics at the Vivantes Clinic Am Urban.

In 2005 she was appointed adjunct professor at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. From 2008 to 2009 she was President of the Spine Arthroplasty Society (later renamed the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery) . She is an honorary member of the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine .

As a specialist in spinal diseases, she received the National Prize of the GDR III in 1986 for research on artificial intervertebral discs . Science and technology class.

In 2004, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the artificial disc that it helped to develop in the US. It was the first prosthetic disc to be approved by the FDA.

Karin Büttner-Janz is the founder of the Büttner-Janz Spinefoundation.

From 2014 to 2016, she studied at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and received a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in general management.

In 2011 Karin Büttner-Janz was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin .

literature

• Andreas Götze, Hans-Jürgen Zeume: Flickflack - world stage of gymnastics. Sport-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-328-00181-6 .
• Short biography for:  Janz, Karin . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Michael Reinsch: Always on. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 91 of April 19, 2013, p. 33 (full-page, current article about Karin Büttner-Janz).

Web links

Commons : Karin Janz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Karin Büttner-Janz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Karin Büttner-Janz in the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame (English)
• Karin Büttner-Janz in the database of the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (English)
• Karin Büttner-Janz in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Portrait, dates and biography of Karin Büttner-Janz in the Hall of Fame of German Sports

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Patent US4759766 : Intervertebral disc endoprosthesis. Published on July 26, 1988 , inventors: Karin Buettner-Janz, Bernd Derr, Klaus-Peter Erkel, Hans-Joachim Helisch, Kurt Schellnack. ( Google.com ).
2. ↑ Jack Zigler, MD: Total Disc Replacement - Charité Artificial Disc. Spine-health.com, accessed on August 13, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Hans-Christoph Keller: "I was happy to be able to get into real life". Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, accessed on August 13, 2017 . 
4. ↑ Karin Büttner-Janz on the website of the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery Archived copy ( memento of the original from November 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ together with Kurt Schellnack, Horst Waldleben and Hartmut Zippel, report in the Berliner Zeitung , October 8, 1986, p. 5
6. ↑ Stephen H. Hochschuler, MD: All About the Charité Artificial Disc: Now Approved for Use in the US Spine-health.com, accessed August 13, 2017 . 
7. ↑ Homepage of the Büttner-Janz Spinefoundation ( Memento of the original from May 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.