Status: 02.11.2023, 14:15 PM
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Jutta Müller was one of the most dazzling and successful coaches in GDR sports: Jutta Müller. © Wolfgang Thieme/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa
For decades, Jutta Müller led a strict regiment and won 57 international medals with her protégés. Her most famous student was Kati Witt. Müller died at the age of 94.
Chemnitz - Jutta Müller was one of the most dazzling and successful coaches in GDR sports. Loyalty to the party line and SED membership did not stop the "Iron Lady" of figure skating from wearing fur coats in the arenas of the world to celebrate their successes alongside their ice skating greats Katarina Witt, Anett Pötzsch, Jan Hoffmann or her daughter Gaby Seyfert. 57 medals at the European Championships, World Championships and Olympic Games are Jutta Müller's unique record.
Müller was 94
At the age of 94, she has now died in a nursing home near Berlin. This was confirmed by her daughter to the German Press Agency. Previously, the MDR had reported on it. "With her passing, the figure skating world has lost one of the greatest coaching personalities and is saddened by her death," said Andreas Wagner, President of the German Skating Union.
"She recognized talent and was driven by herself not to waste it," Witt once said of her strict and authoritarian coach. "She certainly had a lot of her own ambition. But in such a way that she felt responsible to get the best out of it together with the athlete." She was a passionate coach who "actually only thought about figure skating and left nothing to chance".
Championed by world-class athletes
Witt supported her teacher until the end, even though she was always a close reference person for her. "Everyone asks us, 'You still say you?' Yes, I always will! For me, Mrs. Müller is always Mrs. Müller. Out of respect! And yet she is very close to me," Witt had said at the coach's 90th birthday.
Jutta Müller, who was born in Chemnitz, led Witt to Olympic victories in 1984 and 1988, as did Anett Pötzsch in 1980. Together with her daughter Gaby Seyfert and Jan Hoffmann, she also won Olympic silver medals and titles at European and World Championships. "Without them, I would never have achieved this global career," Witt said.
"Much asked and much given"
"I demanded a lot and gave a lot," Müller, who began her coaching career in 1955 at SC Karl-Marx-Stadt, once said. "I took care of everything. We were a unit." Witt was strong enough to grow up as a personality next to the always elegantly dressed coach with the black bun. Gaby Seyfert found it more difficult. She didn't always feel comfortable in the daughter role at the side of the strong coach of the century.
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"She embodied these successes of the GDR, she knew how to produce success," said Udo Dönsdorf, former DEU sports director, about Jutta Müller. "And the GDR system was made for her, offered her all the possibilities, because figure skating had the touch of dazzling."
Attachment to Chemnitz
Jutta Müller herself became GDR champion in pair skating. The city of Chemnitz made her an honorary citizen, and in 2004 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of figure skaters. Even after the end of her coaching career, she was still drawn to the hall of the Chemnitz Ice Skating Club, the former SC Karl-Marx-Stadt. She was particularly fond of the five-time pair skating world champions Aljona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy, whom she often visited during training. And when Savchenko got into trouble with the triple Salchow, it was Müller who gave her advice.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Müller, who was perceived as very close to the SED regime, was no longer in the limelight. The former teacher of German, music, mathematics and sports had joined the party in 1946. "The GDR system could not be adopted. That is clear to me now. But it could have gone on anyway. At the time, I was actually desperate that all this super youth work could no longer exist from one day to the next," Jutta Müller later told the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung". Dpa