Karin Büttner-Janz
East German artistic gymnast (born 1952)
Karin Büttner-Janz (née Janz, born 17 February 1952) is a German medical doctor and former gymnast who won World and Olympic gold medals in artistic gymnastics for East Germany. She is co-inventor of the first artificial intervertebral disc, and from 1990 to 2012, she was chief physician of clinics in Berlin, Germany. She has a foundation named Spinefoundation.
Gymnastics career
Büttner-Janz began training in gymnastics when she was five. Her first coach was her father, Guido Janz. Büttner-Janz moved to a sports school in Forst when she was 10, where she boarded during the week and visited her parents on weekends; she later said "that was not good at this age". She moved to a training center in Berlin in 1966. She trained under Klaus Helbeck, and her final coach was Jürgen Heritz.
At 14, she became the East German champion.
In 1967, at the age of 15, Büttner-Janz was nominated as East German Athlete of the Year after a silver medal on the uneven bars and a bronze medal on the vault at the European championship in Amsterdam.
“Karin Büttner-Janz” enters the record as east German artistic gymnast (born 1952). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Karin, Büttner-Janz and East can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64786. VIAF identifies the subject as 241340. The Library of Congress control number is nr2003023204. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1990, 2012 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karin Büttner-Janz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.