Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [35]
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Other Sports
Though a relatively minor sport in Germany, basketball is gaining in popularity, boosted by the star US NBA (National Basketball Association) player for the Dallas Mavericks, Würzburg-born Dirk Nowitzki (b 1978). In 2007 he won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award, and he was the first European player to be selected for the All-NBA First Team, made up of the best players of a season.
Cycling boomed after Rostock-born Jan Ullrich (b 1973) became the first German to win the Tour de France in 1997. He has also been five times runner up – three times to US cyclist Lance Armstrong. Like Armstrong, Ulrich has often faced allegations of having used illegal performance enhancers, and, in Germany as elsewhere, the public image of cycling has suffered due to allegations and high-profile confessions. Ulrich has consistently rejected such allegations both in and out of court; he retired from professional cycling in 2007 after state prosecutors in Bonn said a DNA test on blood confiscated during a Spanish doping case matched his own. Erik Zabel (b 1970), who comes from Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district, achieved the remarkable by winning the green jersey six years in a row from 1996 to 2001 in the Tour de France and publicly admitted to experimenting briefly with the doping substance EPO in the 1990s.
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Germany’s most successful golfer, Bernhard Langer, is the son of a Russian prisoner of war who jumped off a Siberia-bound train and settled in Bavaria.
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With no fewer than seven World Championship titles and more than 50 Grand Prix wins, Michael Schumacher (b 1969) was the most successful Formula One racing driver ever to have taken to the circuit. Schumacher announced his retirement in 2006 and these days is a hobby motorcycle racer. No stranger to charitable causes, in 2009 he donated a few locks of hair so a Swiss company could process the carbon into a diamond for a multiple-sclerosis society.
In Germany Formula One races are held at the Hockenheim circuit, which hosts the German Grand Prix every two years in alternation with Nürburgring, which is where the European Grand Prix is held.
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The Olympic torch was lit for the first time at the 1936 Olympics: 3000 athletes carried the flame from Olympia (Greece) to Berlin, where medallists were later awarded a laurel crown and potted oak tree.
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Ice-hockey fans will need no introduction to the IIHF World Championship, being held in May 2010 in Cologne and Mannheim. A crowd of 75,976 is expected for the kick-off Germany versus USA match at the Veltins-Arena (AufSchalke) football arena, topping the current outdoor record of 74,554 from a Michigan State University versus University of Michigan match in 2001 in the USA.
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MULTICULTURALISM
Germany would seem more a country of emigrants than immigrants. Not so: it has always attracted immigrants, be it French Huguenots escaping religious persecution (about 30% of Berlin’s population in 1700 was Huguenot), 19th-century Polish miners who settled in the Ruhr region, post-WWII asylum seekers, or foreign Gastarbeiter (guest workers) imported during the 1950s and 1960s to resolve labour shortages. After reunification, the foreign population soared (from 4.5 million in the 1980s to 7.3 million in 2002), as emigrants from the collapsed USSR and the then war-ravaged Yugoslavia sought shelter. Currently about 3000 Spätaussiedler (people of German heritage, mainly from Eastern Europe and Kazakhstan) enter the country each year.
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‘Jürgen wanted his team to play vertically, but he flew out horizontally.’
TRAINER LEGEND OTTO REHHAGEL, DESCRIBING THE ENFORCED HOLIDAY OF FORMER BAYERN-MÜNCHEN COACH JÜRGEN KLINSMANN
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About 6.7 million foreigners (just under 9% of the population) live in Germany, almost a third of these from EU countries and almost half from