Pöhla and the Tiles

Next Wednesday in Pöhla, the kick-off of the newly launched FESA 3 Hills Tour will take place. Even though an era ends with the end of the FIS women's jumping after 20 years, I am extremely pleased that there is again some activity in my region in terms of ski jumping. What most people don’t know: in the 1960s the facility was on the verge of being shut down after a very successful period. But from the very beginning:

The Pöhla jump facility was a popular meeting place for ski jumping enthusiasts in the 1960s and served then as today as a restaurant and club building for SV Fortuna Pöhla. It was thus an important part of the local ski jumping operation. 

The typical East German wooden construction blended harmoniously into the landscape at the time, but in the late 1960s it had to be renewed and modernized.

Time and again there was talk about modernization; the driving forces behind it were Gotthard Trommler and Johannes Riedel. Trommler was then national coach and a well-known figure in the GDR, whose word carried weight. Johannes Riedel – no, he is not related to me – was a ski jumper and later chairman of SV Fortuna Pöhla — thus the public face!

However, modernization faced a major problem. The launching tower, to meet the then standards, had to be rebuilt from a solid brick construction. The tower was three-quarters complete, but the last meters were missing bricks—which were scarce throughout the region at the time.

Unimaginable when you compare it with today, but that was the challenge in the then East Germany (GDR).

A key part of solving the problem was my father Eberhard Riedel. After he stopped competing in 1968, he worked for several years as a member of parliament. It was known back then that he maintained good contacts, which is how Trommler and Riedel approached my father.

'They kept nagging me about helping them with the tiles. Of course I wanted to help, but for me at that time it wasn’t easy to organize twenty to thirty thousand tiles. Especially when money was tight,' remembers Eberhard Riedel well.

'I then went to Schwarzenberg and presented myself there to several people. If you could get tiles at that time, it was there. I described the problem and its urgency, and after some hesitation came the long-awaited message: Ok Ebbs, you’ll get the tiles. You can imagine how we felt back then!'

What sounds unimaginable today was actually decisive for the completion of the ramp at that time. Eberhard continues: 'If we hadn’t managed to get the tiles back then, probably everything would have gone to ruin. The new construction would never have been completed, there would have been no training ramp for Jens and Andreas Weißflog. Imagine that. Thank God it turned out thankfully!'

Today the facility bears the name Jens-Weißflog-Ski Jump Arena and will host many enthusiastic young jumpers on Wednesday as part of the 3 Hills Tour. What a few tiles can accomplish :-)

Yours, Peter Riedel