Ulli Eicke

Ulli Eicke won three silver medals at the Flatwater World Championships. He won the C-1 500 (1977 and 1979) and C-1 1,000 (1985). He also participated in two Summer Olympics, 1976 in Montréal, where he came eighth in both the C-1 500 and the C-1 1,000, and Los Angeles in 1984, where he won the gold medal in the C-1 1,000. As a result, Eicke was awarded the Silver Bay Leaf, Germany’s highest sports award. Domestically, he won 41 West German national titles and was the dominating West German Canadian canoer in the 1970s and 80s.

By profession, Eicke became a sports and mathematics teacher. He then became head of the Cologne-Bonn-Leverkusen Olympic training center from 1987-95, but stumbled upon unproven statements that he claimed his athletes had blanket doping - without any real evidence. Unusually, several TSV Bayer 04 Leverkusen athletes then gave affidavits, without ever having been called to do so. Eicke then went back to his teaching job until 2008.

Eicke later became one of the biggest promoters of dragon boating in Germany, and was a coach at the 1996 and 1997 German and European Championship. From 1996, he organized the biggest race of this kind in Germany, the Düsseldorf dragon boat regatta. He also had a brief, and unsuccessful, stint as a singer.