“He was already blue and stiff”
Former long jump ace found her son dead
Updated March 31, 2026 – 4:50 p.mReading time: 2 minutes
Susen Tiedtke lost her son after only 17 years. Now the former professional athlete remembers the difficult day.
Former long jumper Susen Tiedtke has spoken out for the first time about the sudden death of her son Max. A friend of the then 17-year-old contacted Tiedtke and asked why Max wasn’t answering his phone. She went into his room and saw him lying in bed. “And then I ran up to him and then he was already stiff and blue,” Tiedtke recalled in an RTL interview about the tragedy from almost a year ago.
“It suddenly rips your entire life out of you. It’s your own flesh and blood and then you’re dead,” said Tiedtke. The death of her son came as a complete surprise. It was later discovered that Max was suffering from an undetected heart infection. “He had no symptoms at all. Nevertheless, I think I should have recognized it,” explained Tiedtke in the “Bunte” interview. Max was the younger child of her and ex-tennis player Hendrik Dreekmann. The two were married from 2005 to 2008. Your daughter is 20 years old.
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The former Olympic athlete then fell into a deep hole, as she reported on RTL. “Why should I still be alive when my son is dead?” the current alternative practitioner asked herself. Der Verlust lähmte sie. “I was practically in a semi-comatose state on the sofa for over a month and didn’t know where the front and the back were.”
One thought helped Tiedtke: belief in paradise. “It gives you a little bit of comfort when you know it’s not completely gone,” explained the former track and field athlete, who won silver and bronze at two world championships. She tearfully explained that she was looking for a connection with her son. “I firmly believe that the body is just the shell in which the soul lives for a while,” she explained on “Bunte” and added: “I feel that Max is doing well. Nevertheless, I miss him infinitely.”
Now Tiedtke wants to look forward: “I haven’t worked for a year now and have been living on my savings. Now you have to find your new path again.”
