Rolf von der Laage (GER) renowned sports journalist, organiser of the former Cologne Grand Prix meeting, Asian athletics specialist, and long standing member of the IAAF Press Commission, died on Saturday 14 January 2006 in Cologne, Germany, at the age of 73.
Born on 23 August 1932 in Herzogenrath (North of Aachen), Germany, Rolf von der Laage, whose home club was ‘Aachener Turngemeinde von 1862’, gained his first athletic experiences at the 1949 German Youth Championships in Braunschweig.
Another pivotal moment in his life came while writing for the ‘Aachener Volkszeitung’ at the European Championships in Bern, Switzerland in 1954, as during an interview he first got to know the 19-year-old athlete Manfred Germar. A few decades later the two men would work together organising and promoting the Sportfest of the club ASV Cologne, which was one of the principal athletics meetings in Germany until its demise in the late 1990s.
After his Abitur (graduation from high school), Rolf von der Laage worked for a short while as a miner in Alsdorf close to Aachen. Then back in Cologne, he went on to study medicine, German philology, dramatics and sinology, before going to Asia for over 12 years to work as a correspondent for ‘Deutsche Welle’ and other media outlets. Except for Yemen, Mongolia, North Korea and Brunei, Rolf von der Laage was to visit all Asian countries during his journalistic career.
His first intimate contact with ASV Cologne was when shortly before the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich he organised a training camp for Asian athletes. One of the participants was his future wife, Gladys Chai, a Malaysian high jumper with Chinese roots, who despite her relatively low height won five medals at international Championships in Asia at the event. Rolf von der Laage had at that stage already known Gladys for two years, they having first met at an athletic competition in Burma in 1969.
On the 11 November 1977 (this is the day when people in Cologne start celebrating ‘Karneval’) the German journalist and the later to become photo journalist were married. Since the 1980s the couple established in Cologne their own agency with the name ‘ASVOM-Agentur’, Rolf being responsible for the texts, Gladys for the pictures, and their 23-year-old son Erasmus also works for the business.
Rolf von der Laage’s journalistic specialties were Asian athletics and Chinese sport, with 100 articles written on the subject in ‘Leichtathletik’ alone. He also used his enormous knowledge to write various books about Chinese sports. In 1977 Bartels & Wernitz (Berlin) published his book with the title ‘Sport in China – Gestern und Heute’ (Sport in China – yesterday and today).
Rolf von der Laage worked from 1987 to 1992 at ASV Cologne, under the presidency of Manfred Germar, one of the most popular German athletes of all time. Thanks to his great language abilities he assisted Germar in his position as the Vice meeting director of the ASV Sportfest, and it was Rolf von der Laage’s experience in the organization of the Cologne meeting which led to his membership of the IAAF’s Grand Prix Commission (1991 – 1995) and the biggest Asian athletic meetings used his knowledge extensively. Wearing his journalistic hat, Rolf von der Laage had also been a member of the IAAF Press Commission from the mid-1990’s to the present.
IAAF
With the grateful assistance of Gustav Schwenk
