Ice skating icon stops
Olympic champion Pechstein ends career
Updated on 10.03.2025 – 11:29 a.m.Reading time: 2 min.
Slow skating Olympic champion Claudia Pechstein ends her career. This was announced by the 53 -year -old Berliner on Monday.
After an impressive career, Claudia Pechstein declared her resignation from competitive sports. The 53-year-old announced the end of her active career in her hometown eleven days after setting up her long-term legal dispute with the Ice Run World Association ISU.
“It is enough now. I always said that when everything is over, I stop,” said the five -time Olympic champion and six -time world champion at a press conference. Pechstein emphasized that she will remain the speed of ice – in the future as a trainer and consultant. “So I’m still standing on the ice, but no longer as a athlete,” she said.
A lengthy litigation had recently come to an end, in which Pechstein and her partner Matthias Große and ISU had reached an out -of -court settlement. It was about a claim for pain and suffering and damages in the amount of around 8.4 million euros. The agreement was made on February 27th.
“I longed after the moment the case was over,” said Pechstein. The exact details of the agreement have been kept silent. In a statement Pechstein’s sporting success and its future contribution to the development of ice skate running.
The agreement followed a negotiation at the Munich Higher Regional Court in October 2023. Pechstein had sued ISU after the association had blocked it for two years in 2009 due to increased reticulocyta values. The athlete had always contested doping and emphasized in court that she was innocent.
In the run -up to the agreement, Pechstein, together with her father, underwent another blood test in a Swiss hospital. A “mild form of dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis (DHST)” was diagnosed in her-an inherited blood tanomaly that leads to increased reticulocyte values. Pechstein had already cited this disease as a possible explanation during her lengthy process.
Claudia Pechstein played her first World Cup race in 1991 and won her first of a total of 34 World Cup victories four years later. She celebrated her last success in 2017. Despite her forced break, she was the only woman in the world in 2010 – to take part in eight Olympic winter games and won a total of nine medals, five of them. She also became world champion six times and set up several world records.
Pechstein also convinced with a top ten placement at her last Olympic Games 2022 in Beijing. In the mass start, she became ninth shortly before her 50th birthday. At that time she proudly said: “I think I showed that I am still efficient at my age.”
Even then, it was clear that it was no longer part of the top of the world internation. In 2023 Pechstein won her 43rd German championship title. At the start of last season, she waived the national title fights and for the first time since 2011 it was no longer a World Cup race.