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Only With Passion: Figure Skating's Most Winning Champion on Competition and Life
In the glamorous, ultra-competitive world of figure skating, Katarina Witt is a living legend. She has won more titles than anyone else before her -- including two Olympic gold medals, four world championships, and eight national championships. She is also renowned for independence and self-possession in a world where many stars are in thrall to management companies, and for her ability to stay true to skating while developing new careers in business, movies and television.
Witt has always done whatever she's done with all her heart -- with passion, intelligence, and a love of perfection. Now, in Only with Passion , she offers advice to a new generation of women athletes making their way in the world on how to live full out, compete with edge, and navigate life with grace. When a young skater consults her for advice on whether to train abroad -- and leave a boyfriend behind -- Witt finds occasion to recall the major turning points of her own journey, from her East German childhood to the international spotlight. She shares her inside perspective and frank opinions on the insular world of skating and offers her views about what it takes to be a champion, and to create a fulfilling life. Whether she's talking about life on or off the ice (or on the cover of Playboy !), Witt is always candid, fresh, and down-to-earth.
Written with E.M. Swift, author of My Sergei , one of the best-selling skating books of all time, Only with Passion is the perfect gift for young women, young athletes -- particularly skaters -- and skating fans of all ages.
Witt has always done whatever she's done with all her heart -- with passion, intelligence, and a love of perfection. Now, in Only with Passion , she offers advice to a new generation of women athletes making their way in the world on how to live full out, compete with edge, and navigate life with grace. When a young skater consults her for advice on whether to train abroad -- and leave a boyfriend behind -- Witt finds occasion to recall the major turning points of her own journey, from her East German childhood to the international spotlight. She shares her inside perspective and frank opinions on the insular world of skating and offers her views about what it takes to be a champion, and to create a fulfilling life. Whether she's talking about life on or off the ice (or on the cover of Playboy !), Witt is always candid, fresh, and down-to-earth.
Written with E.M. Swift, author of My Sergei , one of the best-selling skating books of all time, Only with Passion is the perfect gift for young women, young athletes -- particularly skaters -- and skating fans of all ages.
198 pages, Paperback
First published October 17, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 9, 2008
I respect Katarina for her accomplishments in figure skating (winning 2 gold medals) although I don't agree with some of the stuff she did off the ice (pose for Playboy). It was interesting to read and compare how European athletes train vs. American athletes. I learned to appreciate their work ethic and I liked the fact that the government pays for all their training, not like here in the US where families struggle to pay for coaches themselves.
April 24, 2022
What an interesting and fascinating way to write a book, while talking to some protege. It`s kind of like Dan Rathers"The Big Interview" or Brian Johnson taking interviews while being driven around town in a limousine. Katarina has a lot of tenacity and perserverance to become a three time olympic champion; however it was interesting to find that she had the GDR socailist country paying her way through training a tournments. It is with this train of mind, ie thinking that led her to think highly of her country and ones view of payback or give back to her country and by not wanting to defect to the west. Katarina thought that it was wrong to do so since this socailist system was the only one she knew of. I liked her friend Clints view of other peoples ways of life as opposed to hers where she got worked up if she didn`t agree woth them...just leave them be, you can`t change them. And in ending it is great to have full backing from you family towards your endeanors!
December 17, 2013
What can I say? I love figure skating. This book takes you inside KW's head as well as perhaps the heads of other top athletes. I had no idea that she was watched so closely by the GDR and under immense pressure to win for even the smallest of rewards. Sure, the state gave her opportunities but at what cost?
February 22, 2010
This was a good book to read during the Wnter Olympics. It helped me to understnad what was going though the skaters' minds.
I wish the book had been more of an autobiography. The book was based on the premise of Katarina giving advice to a mythical up and coming young skater.
I wish the book had been more of an autobiography. The book was based on the premise of Katarina giving advice to a mythical up and coming young skater.
February 16, 2012
I used to watch figure skating with my grandmother, and Katarina Witt was one of my favorites. She was so beautiful, and always had such amazing routines. I really enjoyed this book, but wish it had been a bit more of a biography/memoir.
March 1, 2014
I've been interested in Katarina Witt for 20 years. Though this book is not a piece of great writing it answered a lot of my questions and wonderings. I enjoyed her sense of humor and her story is pretty incredible.
Read
September 12, 2010...''ve always wanted to skate n perform n able to win an olympic gold medal...but i was a geek not an athlete:-} luv her
December 14, 2011
Decent book. I would have liked more of an autobiography/memoir, but it delivered what it said it would
November 1, 2020
Katarina Witt is/was a German figure skating champion from the former East Germany. She was very popular and prominent in the 1980's when she won the Ladies' gold medal in both the 1984 Calgary and 1988 Sarajevo Olympic games. Later she made a poignant return to the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics with an emotional free skate dedicated to those who suffered in the violence in Sarajevo. She is also the only known figure skater who has posed for Playboy magazine.
Her memoir was published in 2005, just as she reached her 40th birthday. Always outspoken, she offered a liberal dose of opinions and commentary along with those facts of her life she chose to relate. The structure of the memoir is interesting; she describes a visit from a young female skater (a composite of multiple such skaters) during which she tries to help this young lady of 16 make a good decision about her next steps in skating and in life. This provides a framework for many of Ms. Witt's ruminations on career and life. As Ms. Witt and young "Jasmine" review scrapbooks, Witt comments on the events and their meaning.
This is a well-constructed, orderly, and engaging memoir. For figure skating fans (like me) who well remember Katarina Witt's Olympic performances and subsequent appearances, it is an interesting look into her life overall. I also found it quite interesting as a story of a prominent athlete who grew up in the East German athletics machine and then had to adapt to a unified Germany beginning in 1989. She reveals considerable respect and nostalgia for the East German athletics system. Interestingly, in 1989 she lived in an apartment in East Berlin with a view of the wall--and stayed there as the post-wall unified Berlin experienced an explosion of development.
Another major theme of this memoir is life as a famous female athlete/celebrity and how pursuit of some goals makes it impossible to pursue others. Basically, she is a very attractive woman who remained unmarried at 39 and felt a need to explain why. Her answer, in a nutshell, is that she chose to pursue her athletic success and subsequent career with great vigor and no compromises. I did not find her discourse on these issues fully convincing. While remaining single until 30 or so certainly makes sense for an elite athlete, once her competitive career ended it would seem that a family life would have been possible if she placed a high value on that. After all, most female skaters have eventually married and many have had children, some of whom are skaters too.
Another insight I gleaned from this memoir is that while Witt is known as an "artistic" skater as opposed to a "technical" skater, she nonetheless views figure skating primarily as a competition. This competitive drive may have been instilled in her during her many years in East German training. For East German athletes, anything less than a gold medal was failure. She speaks very little about the artistic choices made in developing her programs, which was disappointing to me.
For figure skating fans who have not yet discovered this memoir, it is highly recommended.
Her memoir was published in 2005, just as she reached her 40th birthday. Always outspoken, she offered a liberal dose of opinions and commentary along with those facts of her life she chose to relate. The structure of the memoir is interesting; she describes a visit from a young female skater (a composite of multiple such skaters) during which she tries to help this young lady of 16 make a good decision about her next steps in skating and in life. This provides a framework for many of Ms. Witt's ruminations on career and life. As Ms. Witt and young "Jasmine" review scrapbooks, Witt comments on the events and their meaning.
This is a well-constructed, orderly, and engaging memoir. For figure skating fans (like me) who well remember Katarina Witt's Olympic performances and subsequent appearances, it is an interesting look into her life overall. I also found it quite interesting as a story of a prominent athlete who grew up in the East German athletics machine and then had to adapt to a unified Germany beginning in 1989. She reveals considerable respect and nostalgia for the East German athletics system. Interestingly, in 1989 she lived in an apartment in East Berlin with a view of the wall--and stayed there as the post-wall unified Berlin experienced an explosion of development.
Another major theme of this memoir is life as a famous female athlete/celebrity and how pursuit of some goals makes it impossible to pursue others. Basically, she is a very attractive woman who remained unmarried at 39 and felt a need to explain why. Her answer, in a nutshell, is that she chose to pursue her athletic success and subsequent career with great vigor and no compromises. I did not find her discourse on these issues fully convincing. While remaining single until 30 or so certainly makes sense for an elite athlete, once her competitive career ended it would seem that a family life would have been possible if she placed a high value on that. After all, most female skaters have eventually married and many have had children, some of whom are skaters too.
Another insight I gleaned from this memoir is that while Witt is known as an "artistic" skater as opposed to a "technical" skater, she nonetheless views figure skating primarily as a competition. This competitive drive may have been instilled in her during her many years in East German training. For East German athletes, anything less than a gold medal was failure. She speaks very little about the artistic choices made in developing her programs, which was disappointing to me.
For figure skating fans who have not yet discovered this memoir, it is highly recommended.
January 30, 2025
Probably more like 3.5 than 4, but I’ll round up because I did enjoy the read. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting (I think I thought it’d be a more traditional memoir), but once I got a couple chapters in, I came around on the framing device of the composite character and was able to really indulge in Katarina sharing insight into her career. It is a bit strange reading it now, knowing that an additional 20 years have passed in her life since it was written. I’d love an updated edition with an epilogue about the time since then.
September 21, 2025
Katarina Witt was born in 1965 in East Germany. Witt trained six days a week, competing in her first international competition in 1979. Witt's costumes created controversy and debate, with the ISU changing the clothing regulations. She participated in two Olympics, in 1988 and 1994. I remember watching her in the 1994 Olympics with my Mom. Witt did some tv appearances and hosting, which I also remember her for. This book was a pretty neat memoir about her skating career and personal life. If you are a figure skating fan, I would suggest this for you.
abandoned
October 5, 2022I was initially very interested to read Katarina's story. However right off the bat the imaginary person Jasmine, who is a composite of several people she knows; made me dislike the books direction. Thus, I quickly lost interest and will not be finishing the book.
August 5, 2022
Takes you into the mind, travels, and what it is like to be a top figure skater back in the earth 90s.
May 27, 2018
OK, once I got past the highly debatable subtitle and rather ridiculously sexed-up cover picture, this little book from 2005 was actually quite an enjoyable read. A full biography it is not, but Katarina is not the first female skater - see, for instance, Barbara Ann Scott - to combine scattered biographical facts and philosophical musings into an advice-to-a-young-skater format. At least Katarina's book doesn't include an entire chapter on the details of school figures!
I like Katarina, based on her pretty consistent public persona here and on tv - she's generally very down-to-earth and seems to have a strong grasp on realities both interpersonal and financial. What's more, she appears to have the capacity to form strong female friendships - notably with Sandra Bezic and with her business partner, Elizabeth. She also somehow seems to have maintained a strong relationship, though perhaps part of that is unacknowledged dependency, with a coach, Jutta Muller, whose methods in this gradually-awakening day and age would likely be described as borderline abusive. The strictures on Katarina's weight - and the skater's defence of those strictures - I found troubling. Anyway, it's clear that even 10 years after her last amateur skate, Muller was still a valued part of Witt's career. She takes her fictional young skater friend, "Jasmine", to see her training with Muller for her latest professional project.
One of the self-revelations I most enjoyed was Katarina's complete awareness that she's addicted to showboating. She doesn't seem particularly worried that she thrives on being the centre of attention, and doesn't perform her best unless she's aware of multiple eyes upon her. I'm not sure she quite makes the full connection between that and the fact that she has never settled down into a marriage, but she comes close in the few fairly guarded sentences that she devotes to her longish relationship with Richard Dean Anderson. In fact, rather too much of this narrative is slightly defensive about being an independent single woman, although I can completely understand that she has had to deal with this same narrative for years from the media; all that emphasis on her femininity and her beauty (often at the expense of acknowledging her real athletic chops). That aspect of her life interested me far less than her stories of growing up in East Germany, and also the stories she introduces about some of her East German friends, at least one of whom made the dangerous crossing from East to West Berlin while the wall was still up.
About other skaters of her era, Katarina generally speaking follows the "if you can't say anything nice" rule; she has respectful words for Debi Thomas, and also for Nancy Kerrigan, and she openly regrets that she was so aggressively competitive with Rosalynn Sumners in the pre-1984 years, given how well they got along in the pro years that followed. And then there's this:
"And what was Tonya Harding like?"
"Tonya," I chuckled ruefully. "She was an impressive athlete, I must say. Her jumps were so high. She was very talented, except not in the head. Really, I don't care two cents about her."
She's careful, but it's not North American media-speak. I like that.
If you are curious about how she would describe her Playboy photo-shoot, or the '87 Worlds, '88 Olympics, the '94 Olympics, or Carmen on Ice, you'll find a bit about each of those in here, though none of them is terribly deeply examined. E.M. Swift (the same man who "co-wrote" Gordeeva's My Sergei) has done a good job eliminating any Germanic-sounding glitches from the smooth first-person narrative. There is a photo section, in black and white, not in itself a reason to buy the book, but with some fun novelties (including pictures of Katarina and Anett Poetzch wearing the same competition dress).
I hope we do someday get a more substantial memoir or biography, but in the meantime, this little book has earned its spot on my shelves.
I like Katarina, based on her pretty consistent public persona here and on tv - she's generally very down-to-earth and seems to have a strong grasp on realities both interpersonal and financial. What's more, she appears to have the capacity to form strong female friendships - notably with Sandra Bezic and with her business partner, Elizabeth. She also somehow seems to have maintained a strong relationship, though perhaps part of that is unacknowledged dependency, with a coach, Jutta Muller, whose methods in this gradually-awakening day and age would likely be described as borderline abusive. The strictures on Katarina's weight - and the skater's defence of those strictures - I found troubling. Anyway, it's clear that even 10 years after her last amateur skate, Muller was still a valued part of Witt's career. She takes her fictional young skater friend, "Jasmine", to see her training with Muller for her latest professional project.
One of the self-revelations I most enjoyed was Katarina's complete awareness that she's addicted to showboating. She doesn't seem particularly worried that she thrives on being the centre of attention, and doesn't perform her best unless she's aware of multiple eyes upon her. I'm not sure she quite makes the full connection between that and the fact that she has never settled down into a marriage, but she comes close in the few fairly guarded sentences that she devotes to her longish relationship with Richard Dean Anderson. In fact, rather too much of this narrative is slightly defensive about being an independent single woman, although I can completely understand that she has had to deal with this same narrative for years from the media; all that emphasis on her femininity and her beauty (often at the expense of acknowledging her real athletic chops). That aspect of her life interested me far less than her stories of growing up in East Germany, and also the stories she introduces about some of her East German friends, at least one of whom made the dangerous crossing from East to West Berlin while the wall was still up.
About other skaters of her era, Katarina generally speaking follows the "if you can't say anything nice" rule; she has respectful words for Debi Thomas, and also for Nancy Kerrigan, and she openly regrets that she was so aggressively competitive with Rosalynn Sumners in the pre-1984 years, given how well they got along in the pro years that followed. And then there's this:
"And what was Tonya Harding like?"
"Tonya," I chuckled ruefully. "She was an impressive athlete, I must say. Her jumps were so high. She was very talented, except not in the head. Really, I don't care two cents about her."
She's careful, but it's not North American media-speak. I like that.
If you are curious about how she would describe her Playboy photo-shoot, or the '87 Worlds, '88 Olympics, the '94 Olympics, or Carmen on Ice, you'll find a bit about each of those in here, though none of them is terribly deeply examined. E.M. Swift (the same man who "co-wrote" Gordeeva's My Sergei) has done a good job eliminating any Germanic-sounding glitches from the smooth first-person narrative. There is a photo section, in black and white, not in itself a reason to buy the book, but with some fun novelties (including pictures of Katarina and Anett Poetzch wearing the same competition dress).
I hope we do someday get a more substantial memoir or biography, but in the meantime, this little book has earned its spot on my shelves.
April 29, 2023
Descriptive and interesting take on figure skating.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews