Roetzheim won the AAU all-around title three consecutive years, 1949-51. At the 1951 Pan American Games, he won the gold medal for the all-around and horizontal bar and the silver for the pommel horse and floor exercise. He was a member of the Florida State University National Championship gymnastics team. At the Olympic Games, he placed seventh in the all-around in London and eighth in the all-around in Helsinki.
Roetzheim began his coaching career at Proviso East High School in Chicago, where his teams won numerous state titles. He was the head gymnastics coach at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1968-73, and during this time started the Windy City Gymnastics Invitational. He became the athletic director at UIC in 1974 and is also credited with helping to organize the Illinois High School Boys Gymnastics Program.
He was the first U.S. man elected to the International Gymnastics Federation’s Men’s Technical Committee in 1985 and served through 1996. As a member of the Technical Committee, he served as the superior judge or apparatus supervisor at three Olympic Games: Seoul, Korea (1988); Barcelona, Spain (1992); and Atlanta, USA (1996). He was the supervisor of the pommel horse during the early 1990s and coined the term “flops,” today used to represent combinations of circling elements on one pommel in the men’s artistic gymnastics Code of Points.
