Berlin – Birgit Fischer wishes sun for her day. The party is small. A few friends, the children, but that’s “completely fine,” she says – as long as it stays dry. Because the most successful German athlete at the Olympic Games is celebrating her 60th birthday on Friday, as always, in the open air. For this she has prepared her small garden with a sky swing.
The traditions remain, but otherwise a lot has changed in the life of the canoe icon. She is slowly sneaking out of her paddling school, and she has left her house in Bollmannsruh am Beetzsee. It’s time, says Fischer, “to reorientate oneself a bit”. She now lives in a smaller apartment on the outskirts of Brandenburg. She is “in a phase in which one looks at the direction in which this can go again,” says Fischer. All of this is talked about when she gets together with her loved ones. Also about your sporting career? “Nobody will come up with the idea.”
Birgit Fischer does not peddle her successes
Fischer would have enough to tell. With eight gold medals at the Olympics, she is an exception in German sport, her successes are unmatched. Fischer dominated the canoe world for decades, collecting 27 world championship titles in addition to her Olympic medals. What is important to her is that she won most of them as a team. No one will ever have heard from her “that I put in the foreground: Germany’s most successful athlete,” says Fischer. You don’t peddle it, you can’t compare sports with each other.
This is one of the reasons why she looks calmly at the 2024 games in Paris. Dressage rider Isabell Werth is ready to add an eighth to her seven Olympic victories. At a meeting last year, the rider “told her not just casually that she will continue until she has this eighth gold medal”.
Birgit Fischer sees the Olympic development critically
Fischer will follow, even if her enthusiasm seems to have disappeared. Because the games have changed, says the canoeist, who experienced the boycotts in the 1980s. The event is now a bloated thing, and it is “a bit schizophrenic” that athletes should hold back their own opinions, but have to “serve as a pawn for political decisions”.
She found her sporting limits, archived the Olympics and started to write a second book. Paddling remains an important part of her life, says Fischer: “Just a little slower and hopefully for a very long time.”