Rosemarie Ackermann

Rosemarie Witschas 1974

Rosemarie Ackermann b. Witschas (born April 4, 1952 in Lohsa ) is a former German high jumper . She was the first woman to jump two meters. For the GDR , she won the gold medal at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal .

Life

Ackermann took part in the Olympic Games in Munich under her maiden name Witschas in 1972 and finished in seventh place. At the European Championships in Rome in 1974 , she won her first international title. With the victory height of 1.95 m, she improved the two-year-old world record of the Bulgarian Jordanka Blagoewa by one centimeter.

She achieved the greatest success of her career in 1976. In the run-up to the Olympic Games , Ackermann improved the world record on July 3, 1976 to 1.96 m. In the Olympic competition she prevailed against the Italians Sara Simeoni and Jordanka Blagoewa with a jump of 1.93 m and became Olympic champion.

Ackermann managed to improve the world record twice more. On August 14, 1977, she jumped 1.97 m in Helsinki , two weeks later, on August 26, 1977, in Berlin at the ISTAF, she was the first high jumper in the world to jump 2.00 m. She was the last significant interpreter of the straddle high jump technique. In the same year she was voted Sportswoman of the Year in the GDR , an annual reader survey by the FDJ daily newspaper " Junge Welt ", and European Sportswoman of the Year . She received the world record badge from the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) as a guest of honor of the ISTAF in 1991.

In 1978 she lost her title as European Champion to Sara Simeoni . Like Simeoni, Ackermann initially jumped the new world record height of 2.01 m. When she cheered, however, the mat touched one of the two stands and the bar fell and she had to be content with second place with a jump of 1.99 m.

Ackermann ended her active career in 1980 after the Olympic Games in Moscow , where she had achieved fourth place. While still in the Olympic Village , she struck a nail in the door beam of her room and hung her shoes on it.

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  1978

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  Andrea Reichstein and Rosemarie Ackermann 1980

Rosemarie Ackermann has been a member of SC Cottbus since 1966. There she was trained by Erhard Miek until the end of her career . With a height of 1.73 m, she had a competition weight of 59 kg.

Rosemarie Ackermann's since 1974 Cottbus with the former East German Oberliga - handball player Manfred Ackermann married and has two sons. She worked first as a domestic trade economist and then in the organization of her sports club. After German reunification, she worked as a clerk at the employment agency in Cottbus until she retired in 2015 .

Awards (selection)

• 1974: Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze
• 1976: Patriotic Order of Merit in silver
• 1980: Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold

literature

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

Web links

Commons : Rosemarie Ackermann  - Collection of Images

• Rosemarie Ackermann in the database of World Athletics (English)
• Rosemarie Ackermann in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Rosemarie Ackermann , in Munzinger Online / Sport - Internationales Sportarchiv, in the Munzinger archive , accessed on May 16, 2016 ( beginning of article freely available)
• German EM faces (II): Rosi Ackermann provides a sporting historical moment

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Schweriner Volkszeitung (ed.): Event of the century that one never forgets . Newspaper publisher Schwerin, Schwerin April 20, 1997, p. 8 .
2. ↑ About the honor for the Olympic team of the GDR. Awarded high government awards. Patriotic Order of Merit in silver. In: New Germany . ZEFYS newspaper portal of the Berlin State Library , September 10, 1976, p. 4 , accessed on April 10, 2018 (free registration required).