The essence is still fully recognizable when Ulf Timmermann, 60, answers a video call on Germany’s Baltic coast. The current competition weight of the wildest shot putter of the 1980s is around 120 kilos, while it was a couple of kilos less in his active career, which ended around 30 years ago.
Behind Timmermann, the Baltic Sea gently waves.
– I basically retired a few years ago, but I work here as the financial director of two top-class beach hotels. In addition to elite sports, I completed my final degree in economics in East Berlin and, after the reunification of Germany, in tax law, says the former shot putter who worked as an accountant and tax consultant.
Timmermann is the Olympic champion in his sport, world indoor champion and European champion. But he is especially remembered for the evening in May 1988 in Chania, Crete, where the GDR national team was often at a training camp and competing.
In the spring of the Olympic year, May 22 the dipstick was set at 23.06 to the meter. Thus, Timmermann became the first 23-meter pusher of his kind and the only one who has crossed this sector line using packing technology. This ME is going to stay with him forever, because the spin technique is completely dominant in men’s elite shot put these days.
For example, of the 34 shot putters at the 2019 WC in Doha, only two made it, and neither of them made it to the finals.
A perfect push
After Hania’s boil, ME has been improved by rolling three times. of the USA Ryan Crouser pushed the valid ME 23.56 almost to its date 35 years after Timmermann’s ghost crossing.
– It was a push in which I succeeded in everything, absolutely everything. A perfect performance and lucky to the extent that the second best result of my career was no less than 44 centimeters weaker, Timmermann recalls.
That push of 22.62 meters was also ME, when the GDR man broke it in 1985. After that, Timmermann’s compatriot held the world record before Chania’s magical ball night Udo Beyer and Italian Alessandro Andrei. It is quite a curiosity that the first person to break the 22-meter mark was a wheeler, i.e. the Soviet Union Alexander Baryshnikovalready in 1976. Then he was a complete rarity in the sport.
Timmermann’s record push is still the tenth longest in the all-time statistics. Besides Crouser, only two other Americans have collected more cents, viz Joe Kovacs and 1990 because of doping Randy Barnes.
Part of the decline in packaging technology, with the exception of multi-competitors, is explained by the rule change. After the 2017 rule change, the cyclist can push against the back edge of the 2.135-meter-diameter ring, which is a clear benefit for an athlete who has thoroughly studied the subject, such as Crouser.
In the Olympic final in Seoul in the fall of 1988, Timmermann pushed 22.47 in the sixth round, with which he secured the gold and an Olympic record that lasted for 28 years – which was only broken by Crouser in the Olympic final in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
An iconic opponent
Crouser has had many epic races against Kovacs. Timmermann’s most iconic opponent was a Swiss Werner Gunthorfrom whom he took the Olympic victory in Seoul 1988 in the final round.
– Of course, it’s great to be the one who has pushed the furthest by packing. However, I see no reason why this should be the case. Basically, a talented and well-trained athlete can push by packing as much as the best cyclists. For example By David Storl there would have been full opportunities to push at least 22.70, Timmermann remembers the German multiple-time title race winner, whose record was 22.20.
– It’s not the same thing as in high jumping, where it is certainly possible to go higher by flopping than by spinning. In ball pushing, the limits of packaging technology are invisible.
Timmermann, who started his sport at the age of 13 on the courts of the Pankow district, won the silver medal as the top shot putter at the first World Championships in Helsinki in 1983 at the exceptionally young age of 20.
– It was my first competition for adults and a memorable experience. Helsinki seemed like a wonderful place, and at such a young age, everything was just beginning and the world was full of opportunities, the legend recalls the Games, whose medal statistics were won by the GDR before the USA and the Soviet Union.
– Prize competitions were never difficult for me. Instead, it was often difficult to get anything out of it in training. Somehow I was able to translate the natural competitive excitement into performance.
Among the Finns, the silver medalist also managed to win a silver medal Arto Bryggare, which Timmermann got to know well during the 1980s. The long jumper who won gold at the Helsinki Games Heike Dauten (now Heike Drechsler-Bryggare) with her current husband, Timmermann went to a commercial boxing gym in America in 1987, during the World Indoor Championships in Indianapolis.
Huge confusion
Bryggare has recalled the confusion that the blue-shirted GDR’s performance in the gym caused among the local trainers. Timmermann remembers the situation well, laughs at the memory.
– At the end of the workout, I did a quick bench set of three lifts with 250 kilos with a narrow grip. With a normal grip, I lifted 295 kilos from the bench at my best. I only lifted about 200 kilos from the leg squat. It really put a lot of strain on my lower back, and I never went into such a deep corner in a competition that I would have needed a bigger power level.
At 270 kilos, Timmermann says that in his best gym condition he did a set of three repetitions.
Timmermann, as a rather lean and flat-bellied man, was quite an extraordinary sight in the shot put of his time. Coach Werner Goldmann wanted his athletes to look exactly like this.
– In his training, explosiveness and agility were developed above all. Too much mass would only have been harmful.
A year after the World Championships in Helsinki, Timmermann would have been the favorite to win gold at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, which were however boycotted by the so-called Eastern Bloc under the leadership of the Soviet Union in retaliation for the Western boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games four years ago.
– Of course it was disappointing, but I was only 21 years old and I knew I would still make it to the Olympic Games. However, I knew a lot of experienced athletes for whom Los Angeles would have been their last chance.
In the 1980s, the exotic and spectacular East German interested all the way to America, so much so that Timmermann was informed of the possibility of a million-dollar professional contract in the American football NFL league in the middle of the World Indoor Games in 1987. He had never even tried the sport, it would be good if he had seen it.
The Yankee football dream did not come true. In practice, it would have required an illegal defection from the GDR, which famously shot its citizens in the back at its borders who tried to escape. The opportunity would have opened up for Timmermann in one way or another on a trip abroad, if he had shown such a will to the Americans. But:
– I was not allowed to travel abroad with my own family, i.e. my wife and two children or my parents. There was no question that I would have left them behind at the mercy of possible reprisals.
In addition to coaches, East German athletes traveled abroad to be shepherded by a kind of police truck. Their task was to prevent defections, monitor political orthodoxy and control contacts with non-GDR parties. On sports trips, Timmermann had the best time as the discus throw Olympic champion and who still likes the ME result (74.08) Jürgen Schultin with; the friendship has remained close.
– On the race trips, you could visit the city, but the travel money we received in the West was mostly enough to be able to send postcards home, Timmermann laughs.
– If you were in a training camp abroad, you had more freedom.
Question about the doping program
Timmermann has already been waiting for the next theme of the interview. When the GDR collapsed at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, found in various archives authentic or less authentic documents about the massive doping program of the country’s elite sports.
The test deterrent was non-existent at that time, because no doping tests were even conducted during the training season, and the GDR’s own machinery certainly did not see any interest in burning its own. Also in Finland, even prominent sports figures could publicly consider the anti-doping work as a pointless, unilateral disarmament.
To be sure, the athletes selected for representation abroad were tested within the borders of the GDR in advance, so that they wouldn’t get cold during the competition trip. The only star this happened to was the shot putter. Future Olympic champion and ME woman Ilona Slupianek was caught in a doping test at the European Athletics Cup in Helsinki in 1977.
– It is clear that substances commonly defined as doping were used in the GDR, and especially young people should have been better protected from them. In the doping discussion, I have been disturbed by the definition issue. For example, is a long mountain camp for endurance athletes to raise blood levels an artificial performance enhancement in the same way as certain pharmaceutical preparations?
Timmermann comments on his own relationship with synthetic preparations, such as anabolic steroids or the male hormone testosterone, which were already prohibited in sports at the time:
– I was not medically ahead of my competitors.