18. March 2023  
Leipzig, GER  
Artistic Gymnastics

International Referee Dr. Joerg Fetzer passed away

During the three competition days of the DTB Cup, especially the professional audience in Stuttgart / Germanyhad to cope with the painful loss of two of their outstanding experts. After the death report of Swabian gymnastics veteran, the Svabian expert Kurt KNIRSCH, one learned about the death of the long-time international referee and sports scientist Dr. Joerg FETZER, who died today, a few days after his 82nd birthday, in his hometown Leipzig.
For more than two decades he acted as a referee at Olympic Games, numerous World and European Championships as well as World Cups and national championships with meticulousness and extraordinary expertise.

Until March 2006, Dr. Joerg FETZER was head of the gymnastics department at the Institute for Applied Training Sciences (IAT) in Leipzig.
Under his decisive leadership, he accompanied and supervised for many years with scientific teams the performance development of the top gymnasts as well as, above all, the training of the young age groups through effective performance diagnostics.
Already in GDR times, Jörg Fetzer designed demanding and systematic gymnastics training for young gymnasts through methodical programs, from talent search to the years of beginning international gymnastics careers, which significantly led to the international top position of GDR men's gymnastics at the end of the 1980s.
It is especially due to his commitment that his ideas were put into practice at the side of several head coaches and, above all, continued in essential parts even after the political turnaround.

* Middle: Dr. Jörg FETZER in conversation with his colleague Dr. Klaus Knoll, who just passed away at the beginning of 2023; on the right, the German head referee Siegfried Funk, who also passed away in 2007, in a technical discussion at a tournament of the champions in Cottbus
(c) gymmedia

In the run-up to the change of the international scoring regulations of the "Code de Pointage", Jörg Fetzer, together with his Canadian colleague Hardy Fink and other progressive experts, did valuable preliminary work, which ultimately found its first and successful application in a more progressive scoring system of the world federation in the new scoring system at the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing. There in Beijing he also sat on the judges' panel at the rings...
Not only for all his colleagues and friends, but especially for modern artistic and apparatus gymnastics his death is a bitter loss!
(c) gymmedia / Eckhard Herholz