Kornelia Ender

Kornelia Ender (born October 25, 1958, Plauen, East Germany [now Germany]) is a former swimmer from East Germany who was the first woman to win four gold medals at a single Olympics.

Ender’s natural ability was spotted when she was a child playing on family vacations, and she was trained from a young age by demanding East German coaches who included weightlifting in her training. She was 13 years old when she won three silver medals at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. At the 1976 Games in Montreal, at age 17, she won four gold medals (in the 100-meter freestyle, the 200-meter freestyle, the 100-meter butterfly, and the 4 × 100-meter medley relay) and a silver medal (in the 4 × 100-meter freestyle relay). In three of the events she set new world records (all since broken) and in the fourth equaled an existing world record. Though Ender had excellent freestyle and butterfly strokes, it was her strong starts and expert turns that most often made the difference in her victories. Her Olympic gold medals were the first won by an East German woman swimmer. She retired soon after the Olympics, having broken 23 world records in her career.

During the 1976 Olympics there were many accusations that Ender and her teammates had been using illegal performance-enhancing anabolic steroids. In 1991 a number of East German coaches admitted that some of the women swimmers had been given steroids, although Ender was never named. She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1981. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Ender practiced as a physiotherapist for some 25 years.

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