Ronald Rauhe won the gold medal this Saturday in a four-man kayak, with a fascinating final sprint in a head-to-head race.

This victory together with batsman Max Rendschmidt as well as Tom Liebscher and Max Lemke is a German highlight on the final weekend in Tokyo.

Not just because it was a thrilling race.

But also because German Olympic champions, at least in the male version, have become a rarity in the summer of 2021.

You can almost say: to an endangered species.

In Tokyo, only two German men had managed to leave the global competition behind: the tennis player Alexander Zverev and the swimmer Florian Wellbrock. Two specimens that stand out in many ways. Zverev is the country's first ever male Olympic champion in tennis, and Wellbrock ended a golden dry spell in swimming that had been going on since 1988. Zverev, Wellbrock and now the four-man kayak around Rauhe are something of an exception to the male rule at these games.

Because if you look at who is at the top of the podium, you will discover that not only the competition from the rest of the world has left the German men behind.

In a comparison of the sexes, the German women also succeeded admirably.

Before the final day, she has seven gold medals on her account.

7: 3.

The stronger and more victorious sex at the Summer Olympics: it is female, for the first time.

Troubled male record

Rauhe, whose extraordinary career came to a crowning end in Tokyo, is a special male example in German sport. The 39-year-old kayaker won a medal in Sydney as early as 2000, and in 2004 he was Olympic champion in Athens. It is probably not wrong to say: rough comes from another time. One in which victories of German athletes still seemed a matter of course - and German athletes were a minority. One that had to fight hard for recognition and awareness, far more than it still has to do today.

But the Tokyo Games also show that the encouragement and, not least, the self-empowerment of women are having a positive effect in German sport. Olympic victories in wrestling, such as for Aline Rotter-Focken, the slalom canoeist Ricarda Funk or the track bike foursome are triumphs in sports that have long been reserved for men. And most of them still are today in terms of the number of competitions.

In view of the gloomy male balance sheet, one can also ask what side effects an increasingly critical and changed view of masculinity - and everything that has to do with testosterone - in German sport might show over the years. In other words, exactly where nothing works without pure development of strength and the will to assert yourself. Perhaps the very idea of ​​becoming a male sports hero is no longer as attractive as it used to be. Women don't have this burden, some things seem happier and freer in competition.

The fact that women and girls in this country have received ever broader support in recent years to prove themselves in “male” professions, but also in those sports that have been viewed as “male” for far too long, is not only reflected in an almost equal measure Number of participants at the Olympics.

In Germany it also shows how much the balance of power on the podium has shifted.

Since Barcelona in 1992 there have been 77 Olympic victories for men and 43 for women.

Almost thirty years ago, the German team won 33 gold medals there: 21 men, women only eleven.

Gold in team dressage went to a mixed team.

That also fits into the changed times: In Tokyo, the victorious German dressage team consisted only of women.