Petra Felke

Petra Meier is a redirect to this article. For other people see Petra Mayer .

Petra Felke (1984)

Petra Felke (after marriage to Meier ; after marriage to Lars Felke-Lungershausen again Felke ; * July 30, 1959 in Saalfeld / Saale ) is a former German javelin thrower and Olympic champion .

Sports career

Petra Felke after her 80-meter world record (1988)

The javelin thrower Petra Felke trained together with Ruth Fuchs at SC Motor Jena . When Fuchs' sporting career came to an end, Felke, together with Ute Richter and Antje Kempe, was one of those throwers who restored the connection to the world class for the GDR . She achieved her first place in the GDR Athletics Championships in 1978 with a third place, also in 1981. In 1982 and 1983 it was second place and from 1984 to 1989 it was six gold medals in a row. On June 4, 1985, she set a world record in Schwerin with 75.26 m , which she improved on the same day to 75.40 m.

Her first big success in the international field was the silver medal with 72.52 m at the European Championships in Stuttgart behind the Briton Fatima Whitbread . She also won silver the following year at the World Championships in Rome , where she again only had to admit defeat to Whitbread with 71.76 m. In the same year, on July 29th in Leipzig , she set another world record with 78.90 m.

Her javelin throw on September 9, 1988 in Potsdam over 80.00 m was a record for eternity, because this mark was not reached by any other woman until the introduction of the new javelin 1999. Since then, a new type of design has been prescribed for spears, in which the center of gravity was placed further in front of the center of the spear, so that they fly much shorter.

Shortly afterwards, she won the gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Seoul in 1988 with 74.68 m ahead of Fatima Whitbread (silver) and the German Beate Koch, who also trained at SC Motor Jena . In 1990 she won bronze at the European Championships in Split and in 1991, now starting for the united Germany, silver at the World Championships in Tokyo , where her width of 68.68 m was only exceeded by the Chinese Xu Demei . At the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, ​​she finally came in seventh.

Petra Felke started for Lokomotive Saalfeld, SC Motor Jena and TuS Jena . She is 1.72 m tall and weighed 64 kg at competition times. In the documents on state doping in the GDR that became public after German reunification , the name of Felke was also found among the doped athletes.

Awards (selection)

• 1984 and 1988: Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold

literature

• Klaus Amrhein: Biographical manual on the history of German athletics 1898-2005 . 2 volumes. Darmstadt 2005 published on German Athletics Promotion and Project Society.
• Olaf W. Reimann:  Felke, Petra . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Brigitte Berendonk : Doping. From research to fraud . Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-18677-2 , p. 181

Web links

Commons : Petra Felke  - Collection of Images

• Petra Felke in the database of World Athletics (English)
• Petra Felke in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )