Klaus Bittner (rower)

The European champions from 1964, Bittner is third from the right

Klaus Bittner (born October 23, 1938 in Görlitz ) is a former German rower . He won Olympic gold in Rome in 1960.

Bittner started for the rowing club ATV Ditmarsia Kiel . In 1959, the eighth of the racing community of the Ratzeburg rowing club and Ditmarsia Kiel became German champions. The crew of Klaus Bittner, Karl-Heinz Hopp , Hans Lenk , Manfred Rulffs , Frank Schepke , Kraft Schepke , Walter Schröder and Karl-Heinrich von Groddeck with helmsman Willi Padge also won the European Championships in 1959 shortly afterwards. The media coverage of this victory for Germany -Eight was enormous, the boat crew was voted Team of the Year .

In 1960 the eighth won the German championships ahead of the eighth in Germania Düsseldorf in 1904 . Bittner, the Schepke brothers and Hopp also won the championship titles in the four without a helmsman and in the four with a helmsman. For the qualification for the all-German team against the boats from the GDR, the Düsseldorf eighth divided into a four with and a four without, the eight from Ratzeburg and Kiel under the coach Karl Adam qualified for the Olympic Games . At the Olympic regattas on Lake Albano , the eighth won his prelim and also won the final with a time of 5: 57.18 minutes ahead of the boat from Canada. The nine athletes were once again named Team of the Year.

In 1961, Bittner joined the Schepke brothers and Hopp and the helmsman Reiner Brümmer as a four-man with a helmsman. The boat from Ditmarsia Kiel won both the German championships and the European championships. In 1963, Bittner, who had meanwhile started for Ratzeburg, became European champion in a four-man competition from 1885 with Christian Prey , Egon Böttcher and Gerd Wolter in a racing association between the Ratzeburg Rowing Club and Lübeck RG .

In 1964, Bittner was back in the Ratzeburg eight. The boat in the line-up of Horst Meyer , Jürgen Plagemann , Jürgen Schröder , Karl-Heinrich von Groddeck, Hans-Jürgen Wallbrecht , Klaus Behrens , Klaus Bittner and Klaus Aeffke with helmsman Thomas Ahrens became German and European champions. In the final of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the boat lost to the Americans and won silver.

For his sporting success he was awarded the Silver Laurel Leaf on December 9, 1960 .

After his career, Klaus Bittner was senior teacher in Bad Segeberg. From 1969 he worked for several years as a sports teacher at the Georgii-Gymnasium in Esslingen / Neckar.

literature

• Bodo Harenberg (editorial): The stars of the sport from A-Z . Darmstadt 1970
• Volker Kluge : Summer Olympic Games. The Chronicle II. London 1948 - Tokyo 1964. Sportverlag Berlin, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-328-00740-7 .

Web links

• Klaus Bittner in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ German champions in the eighth
2. ↑ German successes at European rowing championships
3. ↑ Sports report of the federal government of September 29, 1973 to the Bundestag - printed matter 7/1040 - page 75 (pdf , 1.86 MB)