Ulrike Richter

Ulrike Richter, later Schmidt, is a German former backstroke swimmer, born in 1959, who competed for East Germany in the 1970s. At the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal she won three gold medals. She also won two gold medals at the 1973 World Aquatics Championships and two more in 1975, and across her career she set fourteen world records in the 100 metre and 200 metre backstroke and in the medley relay. She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1983. Officials of the East German team later confessed that they had given her performance-enhancing drugs during her career, which is part of the wider doping history of East German sport in that decade and shapes how her results are read today.