It’s early in the morning. Nikolai Willig has packed his swimming bag and walks over to the pool to train. As he does every day. He only has to go across the school playground and he’s there. All the buildings are close together at the Hohenschönhausen National Sports Centre in Berlin. The coach is already waiting. Nikolai Willig, 17 years old, schoolboy from Bremen, is always one of the first to arrive. His day starts with three hours of training in the power training gym and the pool. Then his lessons start. “This year the training tends to last a bit longer,” the swimmer says before diving into the water. Nikolai Willig can swim 50 metres freestyle in less than 30 seconds – with one arm. The best German swimmers take just under 23 seconds – with two. Nikolai is in the midst of preparing for the Paralympics. This is his first time at the world games for people with disabilities – he has already qualified with his good time over 50 metres freestyle.
Nikolai lost his left arm at the age of ten in an accident involving high-voltage current. After a long period in hospital and subsequent rehabilitation he began intensive swimming training straight away. “Of course, when disabled people do sports it’s initially always geared towards coming to terms with their fate and building up their self-confidence,” says Matthias Ulm, swimming coach at the National Sports Centre in Berlin. And that’s as far as it goes for most people; they enjoy the exercise doing one of the 40 sports offered by the German Disabled Sports Association (DBS) – from football for the blind to wheelchair rugby. A total of almost 400,000 people with disabilities go in for sport at one of the 4,700 disabled sports clubs in Germany. In popular sport, it’s all about meeting people and having group experiences. Of course, sport also promotes people’s fitness and health. And strengthening self-confidence and social contacts also has a positive effect on the integration of people with disabilities. But some people simply want more. People like Nikolai. “Then it becomes really tough competitive sport,” says the coach. Swimming is swimming, after all.
Nikolai Willig is only at the beginning of his career. Participating in the Paralympic Games in Beijing will be his first major event. He’s training hard for it, swimming for at least 20 hours and up to 80 kilometres every week. “You have to work at least that hard to get to the top internationally,” he says, very much the sporting pro. For all his bad luck, Nikolai Willig has been lucky in one way. He can combine school and sport at the Hohenschönhausen National Sports Centre. “The system practised here is the model of the future for disabled sports,” says swimming coach Ulm. Three years ago, for example, he wrote the name Willig in his thick notebook for the first time. At the time Nikolai was training in Bremen with able-bodied boys in a swimming club. His times were always a little slower than other kids of the same age without disabilities, but only a little. “I knew I could swim fast. But I also realized that I was hardly improving at all in Bremen,” he remembers. So it wasn’t hard for Ulm to persuade Nikolai and his parents to move him to the Olympic Training Centre in Berlin. Berlin is a centre for disabled sports: almost 40 Paralympic-level athletes have moved to the capital, because the Olympic Training Centre, the elite schools and the young Paralympic Sports Club Berlin all offer excellent facilities for competitive sports. The main issue for Nikolai was smooth interaction between school, sport and his subsequent career prospects. After the Paralympics, Nikolai will start an apprenticeship as a wholesale and export/import trader at a private vocational training academy co-funded by the state of Berlin.
About 50 kilometres away, Marianne Buggenhagen is training at the National Sports Centre in Kienbaum near Frankfurt/Oder. In recent months the 55-year-old athlete from Berlin has been back in her throwing chair. In front of her stands the wheelchair from which she heaved herself into the 75-centimetre-high seat. Again and again she throws the discus onto the broad expanse of grass in front of her. The world record holder often manages a distance of almost 20 metres. Which is where her coach Bernd Mädler is standing. He is forever correcting the movements of Germany’s best-known and most successful disabled athlete. He can feel that Marianne Buggenhagen is ready to go for it again. At the Kienbaum National Sports Centre she is preparing for the Paralympic Games in Beijing – just as seriously and ambitiously as ever.
It will be her fifth Paralympic Games, and she knows it will probably be her last. A paraplegic, Buggenhagen has been in a wheelchair since 1976. “In the early days I was like a duck, completely helpless,” the tall, athletic woman recalls. In East Germany, where Buggenhagen grew up, there was little special funding of sports for people with disabilities. But this young woman developed an almost inexhaustible ambition to take part in sports. She began with basketball and later moved on to athletics, where she has already won 15 gold medals at the Paralympic Games since Barcelona in 1992. “I definitely regard sport as a form of self-help. It was through sport that I learned to put on and take off my trousers on my own. Nobody showed me,” she says between throws. It was not until 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, that she started taking part in sports competitively. She soon became one of the world’s most successful international female athletes. But Marianne Buggenhagen is also a role model for many disabled people: “Sport is always good for you, irrespective of whether you’re interested in competitive or popular sports,” the trained nurse emphasizes. She doesn’t believe in taking it easy. The best thing, she says, would be to draw patients’ attention to the great variety of disabled sports available while they are still in rehabilitation clinics. “This would also help solve the problem of finding up-and-coming disabled athletes in Germany.”
The German Disabled Sports Association is helping to fund the Beijing preparations of Marianne Buggenhagen, Nikolai Willig and many other athletes. However, national sports centres and Olympic training centres that are suitable for the disabled, like the ones in Kienbaum and Berlin, are not to be found everywhere; they are concentrated in eastern Germany. The DBS finances these training camps, and the German Sports Aid Foundation provides financial support for the athletes. “Even if it’s just enough to fill your fuel tank a couple of times,” says Buggenhagen. “But I won’t be worrying about that if I get another medal in Beijing.” In her next throw the discus flies past the 20-meter mark.
