Claudia Kohde-Kilsch

West German tennis player Claudia Kohde-Kilsch won the bronze medal in the women’s doubles with Steffi Graf at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. In the singles she lost her first match against Italian Raffaella Reggi. Kohde-Kilsch was one of the female tennis players in the 1980s that started a tennis boom in Germany.

Kohde-Kilsch’s highest world ranking was number four in 1985 in singles, and number three in the doubles in 1987. With the Czech player Helena Suková she won 19 doubles titles from 1983-87, among them the Grand Slam tournaments of Wimbledon in 1987, and the US Open in 1985. In 1987 she was on the German Federation Cup-winning team.

After her tennis career, Kohde-Kilsch trained as a journalist and worked with the German Football Association at the 2006 World Championships for Disabled People. In 2017 she joined Deutscher Tennisbund as a national chief coach for disabled tennis players.

In 1999 it became known that Kohde-Kilsch’s stepfather Jürgen Kilsch had embezzled large parts of her fortune. The trial, which she led against him several times from 1999, was discontinued in 2004 when Kilsch died. Kohde-Kilsch had to file for bankruptcy in 2011. From 2000-10 she was married to singer and songwriter Chris Bennett.

In 2012, Kohde-Kilsch started a political career supported by Oscar Lafontaine and became a candidate at the 2013 federal election for the Deutsche Bundestag for the left-winged party Die Linke. Between 2014-19 she was elected to the municipal council of her hometown Saarbrücken. In 2019, she moved from Die Linke to the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD).