Peter-Michael Kolbe from Hamburg died at the age of 70. He was one of the most successful rowers in Germany. However, he was denied the great triumph at the Olympics.
The German Rowing Association confirmed Kolbe’s death on Saturday. Kolbe died in a nursing home in Lübeck. He recently suffered from dementia and was in need of help after a bicycle accident last year.
Kolbe was born on August 2, 1953 in Hamburg and is one of the best-known and most successful rowers in Germany.
Fearful opponent Pertti Karppinen
He won 13 international medals in 15 years and proved his exceptional position as the best sculler at times in the 1970s and 1980s. At just 22 years old, he won his first of five world championship titles on August 30, 1975 in Nottingham, England.
But his duels with the Finn Pertti Karppinen went down in sports history. Kolbe tried again and again to win the gold medal at the Olympic Games – in vain.
At the finals in Montreal in 1976 and in Los Angeles in 1984, he lost the final against Karppinen. The images from Montreal in particular are likely to remain present forever, and not just for Kolbe. In the 2,000 m final he had already rowed out a respectable lead when Karppinen, who was previously only known to a small circle of experts, caught up stroke for stroke in the last hundred meters – and won.
Big trouble because of the “piston syringe”
The defeat remained a mystery. And that’s also why an injection given before the final was used as an explanation. Kolbe later complains that this injection had nothing to do with doping. They were just vitamins – and not forbidden. “Doping is what is on the doping list.”
Nobody blamed Kolbe or even punished him, and yet he still felt badly treated. Because the injection that was supposed to make him stronger turned out to be a sporting failure for the favorite – and entered the vocabulary as the “piston injection” because of its performance-inhibiting side effects.
At the Games in Seoul in 1988, Kolbe suffered a similar fate as before with Karppinen – this time the GDR rower Thomas Lange snatched the gold he had hoped for. Despite his five world championship titles, the ten-time German champion in the single sculls was considered by some observers to be “the eternal second”.
Sports director with obstacles
A year later, the “Sportsman of the Year 1975” retired from high-performance sport. Until 1994 he worked as sports director in the German Rowing Association (DRV). A nerve-wracking but also exciting task, as Kolbe assured in retrospect.
But for years a harsh wind was blowing against the North German among the officials. His Hanseatic, cool manner was often misunderstood by the association’s leaders, and he was sometimes personally resented.
In addition, a year after reunification, he reduced the training staff in the East from 200 full-time trainers to a “healthy, economically viable level”, as Kolbe put it at the time. At the end of the “shave” there were only 15 professional trainers left in the east – much to the annoyance of the regional associations.
Returning after 25 years
In 1980, the trained industrial clerk married Aina Moberg, a former Norwegian speed skating champion and sports journalist, whom he had met during an interview. At the beginning of 1982, the exceptional athlete moved with his family to the Norwegian capital Oslo. There he initially worked in the sales office of the Norwegian branch of a German ball bearing manufacturer, then he was export manager for an air conditioning company.
But the Hamburg resident was drawn back to his homeland. In 2004 he separated from his wife. In 2007 he returned to northern Germany and married his former national team rowing colleague Karin Kaschke in Lübeck in 2011. In 2016, Kolbe was the fourth rower to be inducted into the German sports “Hall of Fame” as a “Skuller phenomenon”.
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Hamburg Journal | 12/09/2023 | 19:30 o’clock
