Something like that is called Finale furioso: In the last fight of the German saber fencers in the team competition of the Olympic Games, in the very last fight of his sporting career, Max Hartung catches up point by point against the Hungarian Aron Szilagyi and seems to turn the game from a hopeless position.

Hartung started 13 points behind, 27:40, the three-time Olympic champion only needs 45 points to win the bronze medal with his team.

And then Hartung, while the Hungarian is struggling for his five points, hits him fourteen times with his blade - a game on the knife's edge, literally.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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At the Tokyo Summer Games, Hartung unrestrainedly lived out the passion one last time, with screams, trampling and tears, that great sport makes possible and demands. "On the biggest fencing stage, even against the best in our sport," he said: "That was the opportunity to put everything I have into the balance again." Year old a glorious farewell performance.

For the strongest German saber fencers, a phase of life came to an end. At the age of seven or eight, Hartung, Richard Hübers, Benedikt Wagner and Matyas Szabo, their trainer's son, met while fencing in Dormagen. They grew up together, learned to win and lose. The team was world and European champions. Hartung won the individual title at two European championships and took part in the London 2012 Olympics, those of Rio 2016 and those of Tokyo. It felt, said Hartung, as if they had become brothers.

Hartung laughs when asked to assess whether he has exhausted his potential as a sports politician. He had expected to be asked about his athletic performance. But as successful as he was on the planche, he has moved more on the diplomatic floor. As the elected athlete representative and founding president of Athleten Deutschland, which is almost an athletes' union, he took on the representatives of the associations and fought a sharp edge with Thomas Bach, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and former foil fencer.

In 2018, the year after the founding of the organization, Bach invited Hartung and his colleagues to the association's headquarters in Lausanne to try to talk them out of the demand for the main characters of the Olympic Games to participate financially in the immense income from their marketing. A quarter of the $ 5.7 billion the IOC earns in the four-year period of an Olympiad is claimed by the athletes; that would be a bonus of $ 100,000 for each Olympian.

The athletes flashed off, but it happened, which the IOC did not want. Athletes from other countries and from individual disciplines got together to represent their interests. The Germans got the IOC and the German Olympic Sports Confederation committed to the Federal Cartel Office to open the advertising restrictions for athletes through rule 40 of the Olympic Charter. Now rule 50, which forbids expressing political opinions, has also been softened. The captain of the national hockey team, Nike Lorenz, demonstratively went to the Olympic tournament with socks in the colors of the rainbow.

Hartung becomes managing director of the Sportstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen. There, too, he will support athletes in the best possible way, he says. He will not run for re-election as President of Athleten Deutschland in October. "Time is running out," he says: "Every day I am a little further away from the world as an athlete." He wants to avoid the impression of conflicts of interest that are common in sport.

The world of sport is changing, Hartung has played his part with courage, strategic skill and charm. The greatest success is the establishment of Athleten Deutschland. Despite, or perhaps because of, the resistance of the DOSB leadership, he and his fellow campaigners convinced MPs and the government that top athletes in Olympic and non-Olympic sports need independent and professional interest representation - an organization that enables them to engage in sports politics in addition to top-class sport. This has become a body whose statements and demands seem more competent and authentic than much of what the professional associations and their umbrella organization express.

"I hope that through our commitment we will encourage athletes to develop courage and self-image, to use their stage and to say: My attitude is relevant and I show it," says Hartung. He showed what he meant with a spectacular appearance in the "Current Sports Studio" in March 2020. He asked himself how he, as an athlete, could help the pandemic crisis to pass quickly, he said at the time, citing the Chancellor's appeal and Robert Koch Institute not to endanger others and to avoid contact - and declared that he would not participate in the upcoming summer games. A week later, the IOC postponed the Olympics to 2021. You can be certain that Hartung will continue to campaign for athletes, for sport and sports politics.