DOSB President Alfons Hörmann drew a positive interim conclusion at the half-way stage of the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang:”The athletes were the perfect ambassadors for our country,”said the 57-year-old:”We can look back on the first week with satisfaction, a dose of pride, but also with the necessary amount of humility. It was a valuable and good start, giving us an emotional tailwind.”
At the start of the eighth day of the competition, the German team leads the medal table with nine gold, two silver and four bronze medals. On Saturday, the ski jumpers from the Grossschanze, the biathletes around double Olympic champion Laura Dahlmeier in the mass start and skeleton world champion Jacqueline Lölling could provide for further precious metal.
“We have been able to see all the beauty of sport here,” said Hörmann, who warned at the same time against resting on our laurels in the long term:”Anyone who thinks that we can hold on to this result with today’s means and structures will be amazed by the Beijing Games in 2022 at the latest and will remember Pyeongchang with a painful distorted face.” It is imperative to increase the financial means “.
The high point in South Korea so far for the DOSB president was the gold medal in figure skating by Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot.”The fact that we had to wait 66 years for it makes this success a very special one,” said Hörmann:”But we also enjoyed many other points a lot.
A comparison with Turin in 2006, when a German Olympic team won the medal for the last time, shows how good the mid-term review is: At that time six times gold, six times silver and three times bronze.
The chief of mission, Dirk Schimmelpfennig, warned that the team had “the potential to take part in the fight for the medals every day – but not the guarantee”. Team D “in Pyeongchang had already outbid the gold balance of the complete games of Sochi (8/6/5) on the sixth day of the competition. In Russia, the German team had been on the move in the first week, but then collapsed.
In addition, Hörmann sees his forecast confirmed that Russian athletes will be significantly worse off in the doping scandal four years ago,”This is clear and clearly visible,” said Hörmann on Saturday:”The Russian team is experiencing the highest punishment on a sporting level.
At the beginning of Saturday’s eighth day of the competition, 168 Olympic athletes from Russia (OAR) won just two silver and six bronze medals. If the Russian athletes in South Korea adhere to the requirements of the International Olympic Committee, they could return to Russia at the closing ceremony.
“I consider this approach to be very ambitious,” said Hörmann:”I think it would have been possible to maintain a little more pressure, but the sporting effects of the ban could have hit the Russians much harder than the ban on national symbols at the closing ceremony.