After the last battle, all the emotional moments shot through Peter Joppich’s head again. The bronze coup with the team at the 2012 Olympics in London, for example, or the five WM-Gold medals, but also the bitter defeats that the evergreen of German fencing had to digest. After 20 years at the top of the world, Joppich finally stepped off the Planche.
“Hard to understand it all”
“It’s still hard to understand all that. It was an incredibly beautiful farewell for me.”, said the 39-year-old after the award ceremony at the World Cup in Paris.
Joppich held his ground at the highest level in a fringe sport for around two decades. The foil specialist shaped fencing in Germany – by taking part in five Olympic Games and with a number of World Cups and EM-Medals, but also with his polite manner off the track.
It’s been a long time since his greatest moments, but it’s still a big turning point. After all, Joppich was one of the remnants of a generation in which German fencing was still the much-cited medal forge. After exceptional athlete Max Hartung or Beijing Olympic champion Benjamin Kleibrink left the Planche last summer, the last figurehead is now leaving. The prospects are bleak.
Overtaken by many nations
“Of course it’s a hard cut. It has to be seen that a reconstruction begins”, said Joppich with a view to the extremely difficult future for the German Fencing Association, which had gone empty-handed at the last two summer games and has been waiting for an individual title at a World Cup since Joppich’s World Cup gold in 2010 in Paris.
Other nations would have invested a lot of money. there are many “who overtook us” he warned “You have to make sure that you don’t lose touch there”.
Joppich does not yet know how things will continue for him personally. What is certain is that there will be more time for his partner Ina and his little daughter Nova, even if he could definitely keep fencing. be it “a really weird feeling”, the man from Koblenz admitted that it was finally “a long time” been: “Fencing has been my whole life.”
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Status: 01/17/2022, 16:51