Sven Tippelt

German gymnast Sven Tippelt won the silver medal with the East German team at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Individually, he was an unfortunate fourth in the all-around event, but won two more bronze medals on the parallel bars and rings. On the pommelled horse he finished seventh in the final. Four years later at Barcelona, now representing re-unified Germany, the team finished fourth. Individually, he placed 41st and did not reach an apparatus final.

At World Championships, Tippelt won team bronze medals in 1985 and 1987, and silver in 1989. He added another bronze medal on the parallel bars in 1987. His so-called “Tippelt-Kontergrätsche” (“Tippelt Counter-attack”) was incorporated into the “Code de Pointage” as a conventional move. In the years 1985-87, 1989, and 1990 Tippelt was the GDR national individual all-around champion. Additionally, he won the national titles on the parallel bars in 1985 and 1986, on the rings in 1986 and 1988, and in the floor exercise and horizontal bar in 1986.

After the Barcelona Games, Tippelt retired from international competitive sport due to injury, and in the following years competed only in Bundesliga competitions up to 2000. After his active career, he became a gymnastics coach and referee for the North Rhine-Westphalian club TuS Leopoldshöhe. He earned a degree as a qualified sports teacher from the German University for Physical Culture in Leipzig. After re-training, he worked as a physiotherapist since 2001. In 2008, he became Regional Chief Coach for artistic gymnastics at the Lower Saxony Gymnastics Federation. His father Frank also was a noted gymnastics coach in the former GDR.