Mike Horn (r.) and the German players

Nothing can go wrong anymore for Jogi and his boys. Yesterday, just before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Brasil, the German national football team got a motivational training by an extreme athlete at the team base Campo Bahia. Mike Horn reported to national coach Loew and Co. on his adventures at sea, in the ice and on the highest mountains. Then Mike took the footballers along to his 35-meter-long expedition yacht “Pangaea”, showed them some basics of sailing and headed out to the Atlantic Ocean for a short trip.

Seasick

Captain Mike (r.) with Captain Philipp

“To be honest, there were some who did not feel quite well”, said team manager Oliver Bierhoff. The medical department did not intervene, hence it can not have been so bad. Philipp Lahm, the captain of the national team, not of the yacht, was impressed by Mike Horn. “He has told us many things that could be helpful”, Lahm said. “He has shown us what the human body is able to perform. Unbelievable!”

North Pole in the Arctic winter

Mike on the top of Makalu

The South African Mike Horn has been living in Switzerland for a long time. The 47-year-old is a very versatile adventurer. So he trekked and swam solo from the source to the mouth of the mighty Amazon river in 1997, about 7000 km in 171 days. In 2006, Horn reached with the Norwegian Børge Ousland the North Pole with skis and sled – in the polar night. And Mike climbed on the highest mountains in the world. In 2007, he scaled the eight-thousanders Gasherbrum I and II, in 2010 Broad Peak, all in the Karakoram. Bad weather stopped him at K 2 in 2013. This spring he scaled his fourth eight-thousander, the 8485-meter-high Makalu in Nepal. Among the about 50 successful climbers on the fifth highest mountain in the world Mike Horn, his Swiss teammate Fred Roux and the German climber Florian Huebschenberger were the only ones who did not use bottled oxygen.

Follow-up therapy

Mike Horn will return soon to Brasil to assist the team as they get closer to winning the Cup – and to give them if needed a little “kick in the ass” to make them highly motivated. Before the World Cup 2006 German top climber Stefan Glowacz had made a motivational training for the German national players. They took third place then, after all. But only a secondary summit.