Finally I  found the time to turn my website into English as well. 

It becomes obvious that my main focus had been canoe slalom for the last decades. I've been paddling for more than 20 years now and amazingly I still love it. 
The whole thing started in a paddling family. Both my parents had been paddling and did quite a lot of touring, than my older brother decided to look for something more exciting and ended up doing canoe slalom. I followed a few years later and enjoyed it straight from the beginning. We had an awesome group in our club. With a number of guys at a different age made training heaps of fun and gave me, as the youngest, the opportunity to learn from the older guys and challenge them where ever possible.

Being a junior I raced my frist international races and I was already successful. I had a tough transition into the senior team, because at that time a number of awesome paddler were around like Oliver Fix, Thomas Becker and Jochen Lettmann. Nevertheless I managed to go ahead and joined the national team in 1996 the first time. Having ups and downs I faced my worst time in 1999 where I dislocated my shoulder just a couple of weeks before the World Championships. But I mastered this as well and came back stronger than before, qualified for the Olympic Games in Sydney 2000. After an awesome season I went to the Olympics and won the race with an outstanding performance. From then my life began to change. Even though I finished my studying a year and a half later, after that I started to work and went to another Olympic Games in Athens were I became 5^th.

At the end of the 2004 season I decided to retire and do something what I ever wanted to do. Me and my wife went to Australia for a bit more then a year where I studied at Sydney Uni (Master of Engineering Studies), she volunteered for the Canoeing Worlds in 2005 and we both had a great time.

Biography