Nils Rudolph

Nils Rudolph
Personal information
Surname:	Nils Rudolph
Nation:	German Democratic Republic (until 1990) Germany
Swimming style (s) :	Freestyle, butterfly
Birthday:	August 18, 1965
Place of birth:	Rostock
Size:	1.95 m
Weight:	87 kg
Medal table

Nils Rudolph (born August 18, 1965 in Rostock ) is a former German swimmer . In the early 1990s, he was one of the world's fastest sprinters over the 50 m distance.

Life

In 1983, during the GDR era, Nils Rudolph had to take a four-year break from competitive sports after unauthorized contacts during a swimming competition with the GDR youth team in Italy. He was expelled from the children's and youth sports school and refused to take the Abitur. In 1987 Rudolph returned to competitive sports. At the European Championships in 1989 in Bonn , he took bronze in the 50 m freestyle. After the reunification he started in the first joint German swimming team at the 1991 World Championships in Perth .

Rudolph celebrated his greatest sporting success at the European Championships in Athens in 1991 when he won the gold medal in the 50 m freestyle. He swam a new German record with 22.33 seconds , which lasted until 2005, when Steffen Deibler set a new record with 22.26 seconds when he won the European Junior Championship in Budapest. In the final over 100 m freestyle he only had to admit defeat to Alexander Popow , over 100 m butterfly he won bronze. With the 4 × 100 m freestyle relay, Rudolph won another silver medal with Silko Günzel , Steffen Zesner and Dirk Richter . In the same year, at the European Sprint Championships in Gelsenkirchen , Silko Günzel, Ingolf Rasch and Bengt Zikarsky won the European championship with the 4 × 50 m freestyle relay, winning the 50 m butterfly and silver with the 4 × 50 m individual relay relay.

In 1992 he took part in the Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona , where he reached the finals in the 50 m freestyle.

At the German championships in 1992 he started for SG Hamburg . At national championships he won titles over the 50 m freestyle distance ( 1990 , 1991 and 1992 ) and the 50 m butterfly (1990, 1991), and was successful once each in the 100 m butterfly (1991) and 100 m freestyle (1992) .

In 2001 Torsten Spanneberg managed to improve Nils Rudolph's almost ten-year-old German record over 100 m freestyle (49.52 seconds) at the World Championships in Fukuoka . His record in the 50 m freestyle on the short course (21.76 seconds) lasted fourteen years before Carsten Dehmlow undercut it by 5 hundredths in the 2003 Short Course DM.

Nils Rudolph is still active today and regularly takes part in the Mallorca Open Masters.

Web links

• Nils Rudolph in the Swimrankings.net database (English)
• Nils Rudolph in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nils Rudolph in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
2. ↑ ^{a b} A life without movement is impossible! , Interview with Nils Rudolph, 2008
3. ↑ European Championship title and German record for Junior Deibler  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Notification dated July 15, 2005  
4. ↑ 9th Swimming World Championships in Fukuoka: German flood of medals stopped  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , RP-Online of July 26, 2001  
5. ↑ Van Almsick wins second championship title , Handelsblatt dated November 30, 2003
6. ↑ Nils Rudolph with a German Masters record  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , April 14, 2010