I must have been 5 or 6 when I first stepped onto the ice
of my own free will.
(LEGENDS LIVE ON KATARINA WITT)
I fell in love with everything to do with it
and begged my parents,
"Please let me become an ice skater!"
East Germany had put people into programmes
and she chose skating and skating chose her.
She met Jutta Müller I think at a very young age
and stayed with her through her whole career.
Jutta Müller, who was one of the most famous
figure skating coaches in history.
If Frau Müller caught your eye, there was a chance for you.
I was around that coach of hers.
I thought my coach was tough,
I mean, that was a whole different level of...
Jutta understood how great Katarina was.
She was not only beautiful and had a great body
but she had that extreme focus and she had that hunger.
(OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES SARAJEVO 1984)
When it was announced I was going to Sarajevo
to the Olympic Games
I knew I wanted to win the gold medal.
It was during the Cold War,
a time when rivalries were really created.
There was this feeling of East versus West, good versus bad,
evil communism versus capitalism.
She was stunning and she was gorgeous
and she was a Brooke Shields lookalike
so I'm like, "Great, I'm competing
"against a Brooke Shields lookalike."
I loved the competition.
Training was empty halls, boring, nobody there,
but during the competition
I could be the centre of attention.
You are in a complete tunnel, really focused.
You really close everything else around you off.
And so Katarina skated right before me
and my coach came back to get me,
and usually she'd come back and say, "Oh, my gosh, whatever,
"you can totally beat that."
She just came back, and was just like
deer in the headlights
and when I saw the deer in the headlights in her face
I was like, "Oh, crap."
I don't think I've ever felt pressure like that again.
I remember sitting doing that little,
"Please, oh, please, oh, please, oh, please,
"I hope I won," but I think, deep down,
I kind of knew I hadn't.
I felt like I had let myself down and let the country down.
A 19-year-old mind thinks that way
and as you grow up you learn how lucky you were
to even be at the Olympics.
This is with my coach, Mrs Müller.
This was taken after the awards ceremony at Sarajevo.
Of course the coach is happiest
when her protégé takes a gold medal home.
Katarina wanted to win.
All of the freedom she had to travel abroad, everything -
the car, the apartment - those only went to winners.
The English initials for it were GDR
which I always said stood for Grey, Drab and Repressed,
and Katarina was exactly the opposite of that.
Nobody knew when we could travel next.
It depended on how I performed as an athlete
whether I could qualify for the next competition.
(OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES, CALGARY 1988)
It was an interesting Olympics.
I mean, we had Jamaican bobsled.
We had Eddie the Eagle.
We had Katarina.
After 1984, Rosalynn left the sport.
My toughest rival was gone.
Then Debi Thomas entered the world stage,
my toughest competitor.
One of the things that intensified
the rivalry in Calgary
was that both Debi and Katarina
chose to do their free skate
to music from Bizet's opera Carmen.
Carmen, the complete diva,
and Katarina was a diva in the best sense of the word.
She totally embodied Carmen's personality on the ice.
(CALGARY 1988)
(LADIES FIGURE SKATING - FREE SKATE PROGRAMME)
As a figure skater, you are playing a character,
you need to act, with emotions.
I posed in the middle for nearly 20 seconds.
Today you cannot do this.
Back then I had the time
just to pose and flirt with the audience
and judges in the middle of the performance,
to enjoy the music.
Figure skating is a theatrical sport
and there was nobody more theatrical on the ice
than Katarina Witt.
Lying on the ice,
I knew I had left the door slightly open for Debi Thomas.
Katarina came out to stand at the boards
while Debi was skating.
Other skaters never did that.
Whether it was Katarina's attempt,
as some people thought, to put a hex on Debi,
or whether it was Katarina's attempt to intimidate her,
which clearly was in Katarina's arsenal
of psychological tricks...
When her coach wished her luck, they gave each other high-fives
but Debi missed it.
I thought, "She doesn't seem 100%."
So I realised she wouldn't make it to the top of the ranking
and so I thought, "I have my Olympic victory!"
Debi Thomas was skating to Carmen, Katarina was Carmen.
I had to win gold because
I had done a deal with the GDR government.
I could only continue skating
as a professional
if I won gold.
And this was later. Oops, the pages are falling out.
Brian Boitano whilst shooting our movie, Carmen On Ice.
Figure skaters are so lucky.
After the Olympics they go on to performing
in tours and TV specials.
In the end, we transformed the ice shows
into something more spectacular than ever.
Brian and I invented a "new" and "modern" version
of the ice shows
which was incredibly successful.
We would travel for five months during the year
at a different city on tour.
We were very proud of what we created - Stars On Ice,
and all the television specials,
and it was a pretty amazing time.
All of a sudden in 1993,
she decides to come back to competitive figure skating.
(OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES LILLEHAMMER 1994)
There I was, older, wiser and more mature.
I wanted the experience again.
To get another gold, that would have been impossible.
The generation after me was simply too good, technically.
They had leapt forwards.
They are so young at the Olympic Games.
They don't even realise what they are experiencing.
It's a unique experience, an event,
that you can't share with anyone who hasn't been there.
I'm getting goose bumps immediately
when talking about it.
Her being there, her presenting that programme,
it was like a final statement in front of the world.
For me nowadays,
if you ask me what I am doing, or what my job is,
then all I can really answer is my job is basically being me.
She's got a really wicked, great sense of humour,
she laughs very easily, she's kind of goofy
but then she's really serious when she wants to be.
One of the projects closest to my heart
is my foundation that I founded in 2005
which supports children and teenagers
with physical disabilities,
and this has become more and more important to me
over the years.
Of course, I have to collect money to fund projects,
so that we can help more children.
She will remain one of the greatest of all time
because of having won two Olympic gold medals
and because of her impact on the audiences who saw her.
When the fire burns inside and you have passion,
then you can do anything.
(LEGENDS LIVE ON)