At the same time I knew that Frau Müller only picked the best, and that now I had a chance to be successful. And I must say the first year with her was really fun. She treated me like a child, gently and encouragingly, and taught me the double axel. She used to tell me, "You have so much talent. You can't waste it. I won't allow you to." So I was always thinking: "Katarina, you have to be successful." I loved skating purely from the viewpoint of being an athlete. Every day I was learning something new. Every day I was trying to move up the ladder.

When I turned eleven, though, things got a little more serious.... I was now skating with Annett Potzsch, who in 1980 would become Olympic champion, and was five years older than me. She could do triples. Also a boy, Jan Hoffman, who won a silver medal in the Lake Placid Olympics. He could do triples. They didn't like training with a little kid, but I was always the competitor. I always wanted to do better than everyone else. So those were the perfect surroundings for me.

Annett especially didn't appreciate me being in her group....She started to be afraid of me, the upand - comer, which was kind of silly because at the international level there were so many skaters between us. Annett was a woman and had great compulsory figures, while I was a baby. You had to work your way up in those years. It wasn't like later, after they got rid of compulsories, and someone like Oksana Baiul in one year could arrive on the scene and win the world championship. You had to pay your dues before the judges rewarded you with high placements. That was something I had to learn.