Double Olympic javelin champion Ruth Fuchs dies at age 76

Double Olympic javelin throw champion, politician, owner of a fashion store: after a varied life, former Thuringian world-class athlete Ruth Fuchs died in Jena on Wednesday at the age of 76. This confirmed Thuringia's Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left) and the German Athletics Association with reference to the immediate private environment of Fuchs of the German Press Agency on Wednesday.

The in Egeln near Magdeburg born Fuchs was the first woman who had thrown a javelin over 60 meters. At the end of her career in competitive sports, which lasted between 1967 and 1980, the world's best female javelin thrower failed to reach the 70-meter mark by four centimeters with her sixth and last world record. "Even then, it had briefly annoyed me that four centimeters were missing the 70 meters. Overall, it has been a wonderful time. I am proud of my achievements," Fuchs once said.

In 1967, she won her first of a total of eleven GDR championship titles. In addition to Olympic victories in Munich in 1972 and four years later in Montreal, the athlete from SC Motor Jena also won twice at European championships, several times at the European Cup and at the World Cup, which was held for the first time in 1977. In view of her successes, Fuchs, who was defeated only three times, was also called the "woman with the iron arm."

In addition to sports, Fuchs studied at the DHfK in Leipzig and earned her doctorate in 1984. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fuchs, who had been a member of the SED since 1971, sat in the Bundestag for the PDS until 2002. In 1994, she admitted to taking doping substances. Her second husband and coach Karl Hellmann was considered a doping specialist in the GDR.

After leaving the Bundestag, Fuchs continued to sit in the Thuringian state parliament until 2009. "A strong heart has stopped beating," Ramelow commented on the platform X, formerly Twitter. Addressing Fuchs, he wrote, "sometimes you were too hard for me and sometimes too complicated, but you were always clear."

"Ruth didn't mince words and was a picture-perfect "Poundskerl" as a comrade - reliable, honest, her heart in the right place," Dietmar Bartsch, head of the Left faction in the Bundestag, wrote on Platform X. "You were a strong heart. The leader of the Left Party in the Thuringian state parliament, Stefan Dittes, commented, "Ruth Fuchs will be remembered not only as an outstanding athlete and politician, but also as a committed and combative woman who was always ready to help others."

After her political career, Fuchs ran a fashion store in Jena. "I have always remained true to my basic principles, even if I was spat on from many sides for it. That was very instructive and eventful," Fuchs said before her 70th birthday. Autograph cards still reached her well into old age, she reported.