Former international ice hockey player Sophie Kratzer succumbs to cancer at the age of 30. A moving obituary from her hometown Dorfen.
- Sophie Kratzer dies of cancer at the age of 30.
- In this personal obituary from your home country you can read about your career.
- Because Sophie Kratzer was so much more than a national ice hockey player.
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– “In 20 years I would like to go back to Sochi to see what has become of the sports facilities.” Sophie Kratzer said this in 2014 after returning from the Winter Olympics in Russia. And she was up to so much more. But the international ice hockey player from Velden died at the beginning of last week. She was only 30 years old.
The death of Sophie Kratzer: So much as an ice hockey player
Sophie Kratzer would not do it justice if she only reduced her to ice hockey. “She was musically active, had attended art in high school as an advanced course and played trombone in the big band. Photography was her great passion. She was very interested in politics, ”says her mother Maxi Kratzer. “But of course she was known as an athlete – sport played an important role in terms of time alone.”
Sophie Kratzer played football as a child
And she had talent, not just in ice hockey. As a nine-year-old soccer coach, Manfred Schellner from TSV Velden asked if she could play soccer in ice hockey-free time – like her brother Johann. A girl on the team was not common in the Upper / Lower Bavarian border region. But then she became the top scorer and was quickly integrated into the boys team.
Sophie had registered for the weakest group in the school ski camp because she had hardly any practice on the slopes. At the end of the week, she was in the first group. Apparently, it was very easy because skating is very similar to skiing.
Because she had been ice skating since she took the ESV Gebensbach Christmas course at the age of four. Sophie came to the gang and asked: “Mama, would you buy me a racket for ten marks?” I can borrow a helmet. And then I could play ice hockey in a ski suit. ”
That was the idea of young manager Alfred Irber, and Sophie thought it was good – and in Stefan Petermaier a calm and empathetic trainer who gently promoted her in the following years. When asked about their sporting goal, the boy said back then, and Petermaier remembers this quote very clearly: “If it were possible, I would like to take part in the Olympic Games.”
National ice hockey player Sophie Kratzer: As a girl at Gebensbach, as a student at ESC Dorfen
The girl stormed for Gebensbach, starting with the small children for the ESC Dorfen. And at 14, the ESC Planegg came up to them: Women’s Bundesliga. Ice hockey trips across Germany. “Fortunately, the home games were in Grafing,” tell the three siblings. “That was our family outing.” And they were happy for the success of their sister, who won seven championships with the ESC Planegg. In parallel, she played with the boys as well as in the DEB youth teams and finally in the national team.
Sophie Kratzer ran over 150 times for the German women’s team. Her greatest success: fourth place at the World Cup in the USA in 2017. In sporting terms, she always rated it higher than sixth place at the Olympia, which she almost missed, because she contracted her second cruciate ligament rupture in December 2013, less than three months before the games.
In consultation with her parents, she put her studies (teaching German, history social studies) on hold and continued to work with the support of a small Munich orthopedic team. With success. National coach Peter Kathan took his always reliable center forward to Sochi.
Sophie Kratzer explained to us at the time when she came back from Sochi. “Being there is everything? Maybe that was an intermediate shot. But of course you want to win. “And then she added:” Otherwise you won’t even make it to the Olympics. “
Such sentences never just shot out of the hip at Sophie Kratzer. Fooling the interviewer with platitudes – that was not her way. So she took her time – two, three, four seconds – only then was she ready for an answer: calm, polite, but determined in the matter and often with the invitation to the Reporters to think for themselves. Olympia – that is so great with the TV broadcasts. “There are slow-motions, every scene is accompanied by music. But when you are there yourself, the games are so small, so close, so normal. “
Sophie Kratzer always made her own picture. So she got on the bus and explored the area around Sochi, noticed the houses around the ski jump, the doors of which were simply bricked up. She visited a mountain village and let the view take its toll on you: “You stand on the top, see the Black Sea and think you can start swimming right away.”
Lifted? All teammates would disagree vehemently now. “Sophie was always important to motivate her teammates,” says Julia Zorn, captain of the national team. “She sent them motivational cards, which she drew and made with love and patience.” And Zorn added: “Sophie also had some friends on the Russian team.” Nothing had changed after it was clear that the Russians have deprived them of great success.
Let’s look back: Sochi, 2014, first game of the Olympic tournament. The DEB selection is an outsider in the full hall against the host team, but leads 1-0 after the first third. After the break, the Russians came out of the cabin as if turned up. Everyone saw that at home on the screen and watched the game. The game was still lost. The Russian team was later disqualified. This fraud, especially in the Olympic system, disappointed her daughter, says Maxi Kratzer, “but she never scolded the young women”, but thought about doping. And many other things.
After the state examination, she made the decision: teaching is not the right thing for her. German, history, social studies – that was all exciting for her. But Sophie Kratzer was interested in much more. The first step: she worked for the German Ice Hockey Federation (DEB) in organizing the men’s ice hockey world championships in Cologne and Paris, benefiting from the fact that she was fluent in logistics, English, Italian and French. A year later, in October 2018, she started volunteering at the Catholic School of Journalism. She did research in northeastern India and wrote reports for the Missio magazine, among other things about people who use their bare hands to mine coal there for cents. Together with two colleagues from the Missio publishing house, she won the alternative media award with a multimedia dossier on the topic of gold cell phones.
She had received her first cancer diagnosis over a year earlier. “I’m in treatment, the doctors call it life-extending measures. But I see it a little differently. I take it sporty, ”said Sophie Kratzer to her volunteer colleagues. But this nasty cancer didn’t give her a chance – not even her, who made so much of her talents with her determination and confidence. She never gave up. She was always looking for ways to improve her life, still did a lot of sport and wanted to live on.
There have been some wonderful moments in the past few weeks, for example when her two little nieces visited her in the hospital. The parents, their three siblings, their partner Marie Heinz and their parents accompanied Sophie Kratzer to their far too early end.
The funeral service with subsequent urn burial begins on Saturday, January 25, at 10 a.m. in the parish church of the Assumption in Dorfen.
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