Ice in the soul | Sport

In the 13 years since Katarina Witt won her second Olympic gold she's been accused of informing for the East German Stasi, been branded a 'Commie goat', posed for Playboy and given Donald Trump the brush-off. But through it all one passion has survived - skating

The tale is fascinating enough ('De Niro was absolutely furious, he kept saying he would never come back to France again') but as the East German figure-skating diva speaks - in a rich, heavily accented, Dietrich-like English - my attention drifts away.

Somewhat bizarrely, I imagine that we are actors in one of those Sixties Cold War thrillers. The Ipcress Files or Ice Station Zebra, perhaps. The Eastern Bloc spies have located their quarry and now, as they place her under close surveillance, the type-written notes from their secret log begin stuttering melodramatically across the screen.

Location: the cocktail bar, Renaissance Hotel, Leipzig, East Germany. Time: 1.30am. Subject: important sports-person K. She is fraternising with a British journalist and behaving with Western decadence. She drinks strong liqueur and even smokes a cigar. Her blouse is buttoned inappropriately low at the bosom. Her conversation is dangerously subversive. Recommendation: urgent state action.

My strange - and remarkably lifelike - mental movie reel is still whirring as Witt stubs out her slim panatella and draws the De Niro story to a close. Wisely, however, I resist the fleeting temptation to blurt out what I've been thinking. Okay, Katarina likes a laugh, as the name of her new entertainment company, With Witt, suggests.

Earlier in the evening, for example, as I wandered back to the Lepizig hotel - where I was spending three days interviewing and observing the Olympic double gold medal winner during a three-city tour of her Summer Nights on Ice spectacular - she had crawled the kerb in her silver Mercedes convertible, pretending to proposition me as the Stones belted out from the stereo.

But even for Witt, one suspects, making light of her past life behind the Iron Curtain might be a joke too far. Twelve years may have passed since that momentous day in November 1989 when she returned from a rare unsupervised trip to Spain - where she was filming an ice version of Carmen - and found herself free. Yet even now, as a feted citizen of the modern united Germany, the ghosts of her past continue to haunt her.

In May this year, she learnt that a leading German newspaper planned to take advantage of new open records laws to publish detailed extracts from her old Stasi file: a chillingly intimate 3,000-page dossier kept in Berlin vaults that chronicles her every movement during the Communist era, compiled by the feared East German secret services.

Some might say that Witt has laid herself wide open to such public scrutiny. After all, in her 1993 autobiography she herself disclosed one or two juicier titbits contained in the files, which she was allowed to see soon after the Wall came down. Most memorably, she recalled an entry that was recorded one night when she was alone with a male friend in an East German hotel room. 'Sexual intercourse took place from 20.00 to 20.07,' her spies noted. 'It would have been rather fleeting,' Witt commented dryly in her book.

Nor has she always behaved like the stereotypical fairytale ice-princess, on or off the rink. She has upset figure-skating traditionalists by wearing overly revealing outfits (one of which popped open to expose her breast) and allegedly flirting with men in the audience during her sensual routines. And three years ago she reputedly earned a million dollars by posing nude for Playboy: a 10-page Christmas issue special which featured her doing a naked handstand under a Hawaiian waterfall.

Witt, however, clearly does not subscribe to the view that all this means her private life is now fair game for the media. Indeed, she is so determined to suppress the Stasi dossier - codenamed Flop - that she is seeking a court injunction against the German government, permanently preventing publication. Last year former Chancellor Helmut Kohl began similar proceedings to keep his secret police file closed.

'They are saying the files should be opened for scientific and historic research but it's basically to sell newspapers; that's the bottom line,' she told me earlier in the day, as we chatted in the editing suite of a German TV company which was making a 90-minute special centred around the Summer Nights on Ice show. 'I may have opened the door so much, but I never gave permission for people to observe my personal life: my family, my relationships.

'I feel as though I've been betrayed twice. First by the East Germans, because they made the files on me; and now by the democratic Germany which wants to give these files out. I'm not afraid of what's written. I have no dead bodies in my basement, I'm not hiding anything. But I feel, why should people know about my life in my early years, my teens and my twenties? Why can't they close it? It's not anybody's business.'

The close observation began, she says, when she was just seven years old. By then she was already a budding star of the ruthlessly ambitious state sports programme, which propelled a nation of just 17 million people to the summit of international athletics, above even the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the early Nineties, a German newspaper alleged that Witt became a Stasi informer, and claimed to have evidence that she received money from the agency. She strenuously denies the suggestion, however, and insists she had no idea of the interest that her daily activities aroused. 'I didn't know that I was followed and spied on the whole time till I opened my files. We had to create some form of black humour to survive things in those days.'

She pauses, smiles. 'You know, you would hear a click on your phone and you'd say, "Oh, let's wait until they run out of tape before we finish the conversation." We didn't really think we were being bugged all the time, but we were. They never actually placed a camera in the bathroom (as has been written) but of course my privacy was invaded. For instance, letters I had written to boyfriends were opened, copied and kept in the files.'

The spies would keep in personal contact with her by feigning concern for her security. 'There was this one Japanese guy who had chopped up his girlfriend and put the pieces in his refrigerator. He developed a crush on me and started sending letters saying I looked just like the girlfriend. So naturally, when I performed in Tokyo four or five security guys were around me. It was basically an excuse to be at my side, stay in contact on a regular basis.'

So who was the mystery man in the hotel, and what really happened between 20.00 and 20.07? Witt takes a long, slow slurp of cappuccino and offers a wicked 'wouldn't you like to know?' sort of grin. 'Yes, I was with a man in my room and we were quiet for seven minutes, and they thought intercourse was going on, and it wasn't true.

'The problem was that I was with an English-speaking man - I won't say who he was - and the people who were bugging us had no translator. They were listening on the head-set and heard nothing, so they thought sex must be happening. I wrote about it just to show how far they would go.

'The file is a mixture of totally obscure situations, some of which are not even true. When I read it, sometimes I laughed and sometimes I was in complete shock. In some ways it was like seeing a diary that I had forgotten. They would even describe my mood: if I was happy, if I was grumpy; and I don't know why.

'They just wanted to collect information and fill paper, I suppose. To have the feeling they were in complete control. It was their job. But at the same you realised you had been observed, violated. I was in an early version of the Big Brother TV show, except that in Big Brother you sign a contract to say they can watch you for 24 hours a day.'

This need to control her even extended to her love life. A self-confessed 'tease', she stole her first kiss at nine years old, with a boy she met at a sports training camp, and was rarely short of male attention thereafter. But her first serious relationship, with rock drummer Ingo Pohlitz - whom she met at 18 years old, shortly after winning her first Olympic gold in Sarajevo - so concerned the authorities that they determined to end the affair.

'Inghol had long hair and striped pants, and when he walked into the ice-rink everyone would stare at him, as if a stranger had walked into a Wild West saloon. You can tell that they tried to break us apart. For instance, Inghol had to do his national service, and instead of sending him to the barracks close to me, they sent him to the most northerly part of the country so that it would take all of his two days leave just to travel to see me.

'That's just one thing they did. Because they felt, you know - a musician, rock 'n' roll, sex and drugs - seeing fairytale princess? There's just no way we can allow it. And, really, he was just the sweetest of guys. I met him at a festival where they had figure-skating and music at the same time, and we were sort of on and off together for seven years. We are still best-friends even now.'

Listening to Witt recount these disturbing early experiences, one would expect her now to despise the Communist regime. Decry it at every opportunity. Curiously, however, she has never felt so inclined. On the contrary, she steadfastly refused to join the universal whoop for joy that rang out when the Wall crumbled, and has remained remarkably loyal to the totalitarian East, and its values, ever since.

For several years after 1989 her stance brought widespread opprobrium. The mass-selling tabloid Bildt, Germany's equivalent of the Sun, branded her a 'Commie Goat', and even more sober-minded commentators were baffled by her attitude. Yet her position remains the same. 'I wasn't sceptical, but I was fearful,' she explains. 'I said, 'It's great, but I hope they find the right way. You have to give people time to adjust to the new system.'

'And they basically twisted my words to make it sound like I believed it shouldn't have happened. It was very hurtful, very painful for me. I was 22 years old and all I had done was be a figure-skater and brought joy to an audience, and all of a sudden I was afraid to walk down the street in case I was attacked for my views.

'But I wasn't going to tell lies. I just feel like, everybody loves to do that - go into the past and talk about how difficult it was, and how we had to starve, and how much work we had to do,' she says, shaking her head sadly. 'I don't like doing that. You remember the good times. Somewhere or other everyone has to suffer in life. I hate saying how many sacrifices we had to make. I'm still loyal to the old regime. Not the system, but I haven't forgotten where I came from. I'm loyal to the people who have supported me, to the people who prepared me to be successful. You depend on a team. I have never forgotten that.

'I was happy that the Wall had come down, but I had travelled and seen the world, and I knew it wasn't like people in East Germany had seen on TV. Like a Dynasty or Dallas soap opera. That's what people were comparing capitalism with. It made me unpopular, but now, after a lot of years, people say they respect that I didn't just turn in the direction that was popular at the time. I will never turn round and say I lived in a horrible country and had a horrible time because the success I have today would never have been possible if I had grown up in the West. All the groundwork was laid in East Germany.'

For one thing, she says, she would never have been able to afford the intensive training and equipment which the state provided for her. Born in December 1965 in Berlin, and raised in the grim, industrial city of Karl Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz), her father was the poorly paid manager of an agricultural co-operative and her mother was a physiotherapist. They lived in a tiny apartment where she shared a bedroom with her older brother Axel, a promising footballer until a hip injury stopped him playing.

Their flat happened to be close to the main ice-rink and by five years old Katarina was captivated by the sport. At the time the government was striving to produce the next generation of champion figure-skaters, so she had little difficulty in enrolling for free tuition. She denies, though, that she was somehow 'genetically selected' for the sports programme, as has been reported. Neither of her parents, who met at a folk dancing club, were particularly athletic, she says, but to her skating came as naturally as walking.

'I started the programme with 100 other kids, and five years later there only five or six of us left. That may sound unfair, but you have to understand that the state couldn't afford to pay for 100 kids who just wanted to do the sport for the sake of it. Of course, it was very sad in some ways. You never had the chance to be a recreational figure-skater. Everything was driven towards landing up on the top of the winner's podium.'

The mission to put Witt on the podium began in earnest at nine years old, when she was placed under the tutelage of the infamous - and fearsome - coach Jutta Muller, whose implacable rink-side manner and slavish devotion to the cause of East German figure-skating supremacy earned her the sobriquet Rosa Klebb, the sinister spy pitted against James Bond in From Russia With Love.

Muller, a former champion roller-skater commandeered to oversee the state ice-skating programme, was notorious for her relentlessly harsh training methods. But only Witt really knows how tough she could be. 'It was the language she used, the constant pressure you put on somebody. There was never one day when we took it easy. I was always pushing for the limit. She was telling me to do the same jump 10,000 times, and of course sometimes she screamed and used words that you don't want to hear.'

She declines, at first, to reveal Muller's precise phraseology, saying she has no wish to hurt her former mentor. Later, however, when the caipirinha has lubricated her tongue, she recalls some of her choicer insults. 'She would call me a fat cow, a fat bitch,' she says grimly. 'I always liked sweets and in the summer, when I wasn't performing, my weight would go up from around 52kgs to maybe 57.

'Also, when a girl is 16 or 17 her body really changes. You develop a woman's figure, but you can't go on the ice and be fat - it looks horrible and it has no aesthetic merit. So Frau Muller would put me on a strict diet. The sad thing for me is that it was always extreme. I would almost eat nothing, which was wrong. In the morning, maybe a piece of bread. At lunchtime, just rice and an apple, and nothing in the evening.

'I was starving hungry, and training seven hours a day. Sometimes I would have to run with the track athletes. Fifteen laps, and always at noon, when the sun was hottest.' She glances momentarily down at her figure. At 35, she is considerably more voluptuous now than in her medal-winning heyday, but she remains remarkably well-toned. 'I have no idea what I weigh now,' she says. 'I never go near the scales because for many years I was forced to use them twice a day.

At least, she says, she was not plied with steroids like so many other top East German sports stars. Not because anyone was concerned about her health or the ethics of taking performance-enhancing drugs. It was simply felt that they would not benefit female figure-skaters, who needed to retain their femininity to appeal to the judge's eye. 'That was something that was definitely bad,' she says of the state's cynical abuse of drugs. 'Kids were given pills and they didn't even know what they were. We thought our country's sport was clean.'

Still, all that hardship. All those wounding personal insults. How she must hate old Rosa Klebb now, I venture. No, no, she reproaches me, I misunderstand. She has the utmost respect for Muller. 'Yes, I sometimes hated her attitude at the time, but I can understand now why she did and said all those things. The Western athletes just weren't getting the same attention. I'm thankful for how the system worked, for how sophisticated we were trained. Now you see kids who just go on the ice and try to jump. It's a waste of time. You need to get your body into shape. With a free will, you don't push yourself to the limit.'

Over time, she says, the came to regard her draconian coach as a second mother. 'I saw more of her in those days than my parents. She even knitted me mittens. She only wanted the best for me, and she got that.' She shrugs and sighs. 'Anyway, it was an extreme situation for both of us.'

Frau Muller, as Witt still respectfully refers to her, was under severe pressure to succeed, she explains. Her own standard of living - apartment, salary, access to luxury goods - depended purely on the number of medals her charges brought home.

Witt was labouring under the same carrot and stick reward system. At 19, after winning Olympic gold, she was given her own flat (albeit a 45 square-metre box) and jumped the 10-year waiting list for a new Lada. Two years later, when she 'only' came second in the World Championships, she received a stern letter from the sports federation expressing disappointment in her substandard performance and exhorting her to 'try harder next year'.

The letters were usually congratulatory, however, and it was rumoured that her unprecedented success brought bouquets and personal supper invitations from the hardline premier Erich Honecker, with whom she was said to have been on first name terms. She denies this, claiming she met 'Herr Honecker' only twice, at homecoming dinners for the entire East German Olympic team.

Whatever the truth, her recognition was well deserved. During a glittering 10-year amateur career she won eight national championships, six European championships, four World championships, plus, of course, those 1984 and 1988 Olympic golds. Today the medals lie mouldering at the bottom of some forgotten packing case, for Witt has never been one to polish her trophies and hang them on the wall.

What she always valued most was the acclaim. The gasps as she glided down from a perfect triple; the cries for more as her performance drew, swanlike, to a close. She still craves for it now, which is why she continues to skate as a professional even though her back sometimes aches so much she is almost bent double, and her feet, knees and ankles also pain her terribly.

'In a way I'm addicted to the strange kind of love that the audience gives me,' she says. 'Sometimes I find myself wondering why I have always been desperate for the love of 5,000 strangers who I will never meet, and would never want to meet. It gets to the point where I would rather leave behind my loved ones at home - my family, friends, boyfriend - and seek the acclaim of a crowd in a strange ice-rink. Sometimes people are so appreciative that it moves me to tears.' She gives a hollow laugh. 'A psychologist would have a good time analysing that.'

Witt's rise to global recognition began after her 1984 triumph, when the Americans began comparing her looks to those of their new movie pin-up, the similarly dark and brooding Brooke Shields. 'It was funny, we met soon afterwards and she said, "Hi, sister'", she recalls. But it was only four years later, after she landed the second gold at Calgary, that she realised just how internationally famous and sought-after she had become.

In the oft-repeated words of one US journalist, she was revered as 'the beautiful face of socialism' - which she thought unfair, since 'there were many other beautiful girls in the East who didn't get seen'. Her popularity was enhanced, she says, because, unlike other Iron Curtain athletes, she was prepared to break the rules by talking openly to Western journalists. 'And I was naturally flirtatious when I skated. People think I was trying to be sexy on purpose, but back then I didn't even know what sex appeal meant.'

Around this time there were tacit inducements for her to defect, but she was never tempted. 'The Americans were saying, "You could make so much money here," but I didn't care. I loved my family and friends, and where I lived. If I'd defected I didn't know when I'd see them again. It wasn't worth it for any money in the world and - I know it sounds silly - but I was loyal. It would have felt like I was betraying the people I loved.'

Within a year, in any event, the question of defection had become obsolete. In theory, the collapse of the Wall meant Witt could at last come and go - and earn - as she pleased. Paradoxically, however, she found the reality painfully different. It wasn't only that her new West German compatriots perceived her to be an apologist for Communism. She abhorred the way Frau Muller - 'one of the most successful coaches in the entire world' - was outcast. 'They should have used her experience but they turned their back on her. East Germany was always a strong figure-skating nation and once we became one country the power of the federation went to West Germany, and I believe they got rid of the old system because they wanted revenge.'

Infuriated, she moved across the Atlantic, where, again ironically, she felt more accepted. 'It was very difficult to call Germany home by that time. My real home had disappeared and I started to define home in completely different ways. I still do. If I go "home" now, it could be to a tree close to my house, because I grew up with it. Or to stay with my family. My home is where I'm welcome, and I believe I wasn't welcome in Germany for many years.'

In the US, she became an instant celebrity. There were lucrative advertising endorsements, talk-shows, minor movie roles, endless A-List party invitations; and, inevitably, a terrifying episode with a deranged stalker who was sectioned for bombarding her with obscene and threatening letters, and calling at her home in the early hours, swearing his undying love.

Her name also became linked with a string of high-profile suitors. She was said to be romancing, by turns, Boris Becker, skiing champion Alberto Tomba and property mogul Donald Trump. In truth, she says, 'I never dated any of these guys' - though Trump did make a play for her after a show at Madison Square Gardens.

'We had a party afterwards and he walked up to me and said, "Katarina, you are the only woman I have given my private number to, and has never called back". I just laughed and said, "Well, somebody has to start a trend". A woman from GQ magazine was there, and she wrote the story. And Trump hated me for that. He was really upset about it. Then he said things in the paper: "she wanted to get in contact with me, but she has a bad complexion and a back like a refrigerator". It was very strange. I think his pride was hurt, you know, but he fought back in the wrong way.'

One relationship that was genuine was with the actor Richard Dean Anderson, star of the McGuyver TV series. According to friends, they were set to marry until Anderson - then aged 42 and 17 years Witt's senior - saw a CNN report alleging that she had informed for the Stasi, and abruptly ended the affair. Witt rebutted this explanation, saying they simply grew apart.

For the past five years her boyfriend has been Marcos Hermann, a Berlin-based publicist and pop group manager, but the real love of her life, one senses, remains her skating. Since 1994, when she re-instated as an amateur in an abortive attempt to win a third Olympic medal at Lillehammer (an interlude that was overshadowed by the Tonya Harding versus Nancy Kerrigan knee-capping fiasco) she has been touring almost continually in lavishly produced ice extravaganzas.

She keeps a Berlin apartment and a country house outside the city, but in America she still lives out of a suitcase, and has only recently bought a piece of prime real-estate in Sun Valley, Idaho, where Clint Eastwood will be her near- neighbour.

In Europe, if not the United States, big professional ice-skating shows are rather outdated. Their popularity waned in the early Nineties, when marketable stars such as Torville and Dean and Robin Cousins faded from the scene. Witt acknowledges the trend, but she is trying desperately hard to reverse it. And where better to start than here in her old East German stamping ground, where the Saxony folk still refer to her warmly as 'our Katarina'?

Her Leipzig gala is wonderfully over the top: a celebration of love and passion played out to rapturous applause from a sell-out 5,000 crowd, some dressed traditionally in lederhosen and colourful pinafore dresses, who stomp their feet rhythmically as the show reaches its finale and bouquets are presented to the skaters. There is a cameo appearance by the salsa singer Lou Bega, and the cast includes an array of past figure-skating stars.

But it is Witt alone whose presence has brought the people to this vast hangar-like building, once used for Eastern Bloc trade-fair displays - and doesn't she know it. Her performances these days wouldn't win any perfect sixes for technical merit. There are no gravity-defying triples (though she's sure she could still pull them off with more training) but to analyse her routines is to miss the point. It's her style and grace that always set Witt apart.

Tonight, alluring as ever in a dazzling red sequinned outfit, she captivates us with a mesmerising dance to the sultry sounds of 'Fever'; then, ever the drama queen, she bows down slavishly before a shrunken, wizened old woman in the VIP section. Frau Muller, who has come to watch her best pupil for the first time in years, allows herself a rare, most un-Rosa Klebb-like smile.

The following morning, when we meet in the hotel breakfast room, Witt is still sky-high on adrenaline, and even 12 hours later, after a full day's work in the TV editing suite, she has energy left to burn. And so to the cocktail bar. After she has recounted the De Niro episode, and another zany story about a white-knuckle drive with Gerhard Berger across the Austrian Alps, I ask her, gingerly, when she might retire. A bleak expression crosses her face. 'To be honest, it's painful even to think about that,' she says. 'You see, I'm living a dream, and I don't ever want to wake up.'

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