International Swimming Hall of Fame Honorees By Country (Germany)

She was winning youth championships in Germany at age 14 and was quickly becoming one of the top junior swimmers in all of Europe. At the 1999 European Junior Championships when she was just 15, Britta Steffen won six gold medals.

She was born in Thale, a small town in East Germany into a family that wasn’t interested in sports. However, at age seven under the East German sport system, she was discovered by talent scouts, learned to swim, started to compete and was soon sent to a centralized sports academy away from home to further develop her talent.

Growing up in Berlin, Germany in the former GDR, "Franzi" loved swimming, joined a team and by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she was ready to burst onto the international swimming scene. At age 14, at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelo­na, she was the youngest participant of the re-united German team, and sensationally won the 200m and 100 m freestyle silver and bronze medals, as well as silver and bronze medals on Germany's medley and freestyle relays. She set the 200m freestyle World Record at the 1994 World Cham­pionships in Rome, breaking an eight-year record held by Heike Friedrich, the last of the GDR swimmers. She broke her own record in 2002 in Berlin. Overall, her 200m freestyle World Record stood for 13 years until broken by Federica Pellegrini of Italy in 2007. Franziska held the record longer than any other female in that event except for Hall of Fame swimmer Ragenhild Hveger of Denmark from 1938 to 1956.