Boxing legend Henry Maske is worried about Germany’s competitiveness. Two major events in particular have recently stood out negatively.
Henry Maske spoke critically about the state and competitiveness of German competitive sport at the “German SportFilmFest”.
The German boxing legend spoke at the presentation of a documentary about his career (“Henry Maske – mein Weg”) at the Ebertbad in Oberhausen – and was unsparing in his thoughts: “That scares me!”
The 62-year-old criticized in particular the lack of top performances in German sport. “For me, the most painful moment was the World Championships in athletics, that was really sad. There are sports in which you can be left behind. But athletics is a very broad field, with the best coming from many different disciplines and cities. We used to always be there, and now there’s hardly anyone left.”
Mask: “That doesn’t even exist”
In the final medal table, Germany only came eleventh, with the only gold medal coming from Leo Neugebauer, who trains in the USA, in the decathlon. Maske was depressed: “Our supposed aces didn’t make it either. I thought: ‘That doesn’t even exist’.“
However, the gap to the world’s best is now also obvious in winter sports: ”If the biathletes are no longer there, then that’s scary. And that’s a reflection of society. That scares me.”
At the Winter Games in Milan and Cortina, the German skiers only won a bronze medal in the mixed relay – there had never been a worse result in the history of the Olympics.
Maskke blamed the drop in performance on German sports funding and the structures that have been put in place since the fall of communism: “It’s not just a little bit that’s not going right, but a lot that’s going wrong. That’s frightening.”
