Germany
2012

The 2012 season in short

Germany's 2012 season peaked at the London Olympics with eight athletics medals — one gold, five silver, two bronze, as the list stands today after later doping reallocations — ninth in the athletics medal table.

The shape of the haul is the story: every single medal came from the field. Five from the throws, two from the pole vault, one from the heptathlon — and not one from a running event. While others sprinted, Germany threw and vaulted.

The gold: nine centimetres and a torn shirt

The gold was nine centimetres wide.

Robert Harting arrived in London unbeaten for two and a half years and won the discus with 68.27 m — 9 cm ahead of Iran's Ehsan Haddadi, with the whole podium inside 24 cm. Then came the celebration that made the night: he ripped his shirt off and, on the victory lap, hurdled the row of women's 100m hurdles already set out on the track for the evening's final.

Double podiums and a medal that grew in the mail

Behind the gold, the field team stacked the podiums.

David Storl opened the Games with shot put silver (21.86 m), three centimetres behind Tomasz Majewski. Lilli Schwarzkopf took heptathlon silver after a one-hour scare: wrongly disqualified for a lane infringement after the 800m, she was reinstated when officials realised the fault belonged to the athlete in the next lane. In the javelin, Christina Obergföll (65.16 m) and Linda Stahl (64.91 m) took silver and bronze together; in the pole vault, Björn Otto and Raphael Holzdeppe both cleared 5.91 m behind Renaud Lavillenie and split silver and bronze on countback — two Germans on one podium, twice in one Games.

And one medal grew in the mail. Betty Heidler's hammer throw of 77.12 m — first mis-measured, marked with a penny and recovered from the measuring device's memory — earned bronze on the night. When Tatyana Lysenko was disqualified for doping in 2016, Heidler moved up to silver; she finally received the medal at a ceremony in May 2019, seven years after the throw.

Every German medal in London

The eight medals, as the list stands today:

• GoldRobert Harting — Discus68.27 m
• SilverDavid Storl — Shot put21.86 m
• SilverLilli Schwarzkopf — Heptathlon6,649
• SilverChristina Obergföll — Javelin65.16 m
• SilverBjörn Otto — Pole vault5.91 m
• SilverBetty Heidler — Hammer77.12 m
• BronzeLinda Stahl — Javelin64.91 m
• BronzeRaphael Holzdeppe — Pole vault5.91 m

Split the haul by terrain and the pattern is total — the track column is empty:

The kit: Germany Pro Elite 2012

Germany competed in London in the Germany Pro Elite 2012 cycle — the race-issued kit made for the national-team athletes, not a retail line with a badge on it. The German federation (DLV) has been supplied by Nike since 2005, on a first contract that ran exactly through 2012.

The 2012 German rail in the archive is a small, authentic slice of that cycle — three pieces, fourteen years on. What is here is shown below; for the rest of the German range, the full collection is a click away.