70 years of high-performance sport in Oberwiesenthal

The Oberwiesenthal sports scene currently has a lot to celebrate. 70 years of competitive sport in Oberwiesenthal as well as 60 years of the Elite School of Wintersport in Oberwiesenthal—that is undoubtedly a great occasion that must be celebrated properly.

The 70-year history of Oberwiesenthal, on the one hand at the school level and institutionally at such a high level of competitive sport, is impressive. Many athletes who are highly successful today passed through this school. In recent years it was especially Nordic athletes who drew international attention, but in the early days it was mainly alpine racers and bobsledders who carried the name Oberwiesenthal into the world with their successes.

Where I’m already into the topic and want to address it in a few lines here, I am deeply disappointed.

Last night, the celebrations opened with a ceremonial act, to which many former athletes were invited. Including my father Eberhard Riedel, who, almost exactly 70 years ago, together with Peter Lützendorf, Ernst Scherzer and others, stirred up the international alpine skiing scene and celebrated World Cup wins.

These successes fell exactly in the early period of this ‘golden’ 70 years, for which today Oberwiesenthal sports officials pat themselves on the back.

During the celebrations, however, the former alpine racers were honored with NOT A SINGLE WORD. In the laudation by MDR sports expert Thorsten Kutschke they were deftly left out, while the Nordic athletes and bobsledders were showered with roses.

The 88-year-old Ernst Scherzer summed it up: ‘I don’t understand the world anymore’… haven’t we properly engaged with history? How can such an important historical event be ignored at such a wonderful celebration?

Sure, it’s been a long time. But isn’t that precisely the task of anniversaries? Bringing the past achievements back into the foreground. It almost seems like an insult to honor all other disciplines while leaving out the Alpine camp that was so successful back then.

I’m not accusing the people responsible of not doing their homework and merely forgetting us. Thorsten Kutschke is a pro in his field; such an error wouldn’t occur to him. More likely, and this is the really sad part, the alpine disciplines were deliberately left out.

In a conversation a German sports scientist, who rose high in the DDR sports hierarchy, said that for him the Alpine disciplines were ‘a sporting problem’ back then. Probably the structural orientation was clearly on other sports such as gymnastics, luge, and Nordic disciplines. These sports where one could seemingly quickly win Olympic medals and international fame.

Alpine skiing was there — despite the successes — even a ‘problem’ that was successfully resolved after the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. That is, no longer funded.

Those were other times and certainly other forces at work. That even now — 70 years later — this doctrine remains and it fails to reframe and honor these historical events with sufficient distance is very, very sad.