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Christian Fuchs, a German athletics journalist and founder of Leichtathletik.de, died at his home in Straubing, Germany, on Monday (8). Fuchs, who had been battling cancer, was 43.
Educated and trained as a banker, Fuchs switched his professional pursuits towards his passion for athletics, first with the popular ground-breaking website steeple.de in the late 1990s before turning his attention to the German athletics federation's website Leichtathletik.de in 2002, when he became its first full-time manager and editor. Today, the site attracts more than 500,000 visitors each month.
Fuchs then spent more than a decade promoting and reporting on the sport before becoming a freelance consultant in 2013.
"Technically, Fuchs was an outstanding journalist with a great passion for accurate research and detailed knowledge, as well as a team player and visionary who stuck to his ideas even when others did not believe in them," his colleague and friend Peter Schmitt wrote today on Leichtathletik.de.
"The courage to make decisions was one of the premises of his success. He was simply a humble and lovable person."
Fuchs was a regular fixture at national and international events for the past decade-and-a-half, popular among athletes, coaches and colleagues. He last reported internationally last March from the 2017 European Indoor Championships in Belgrade.
Bob Ramsak for the IAAF
