Sports Technology
The Vision of the Eternal Winter
In the coming weeks we will take you on a time travel through 20 years of Peter Riedel Sports Technology – with exciting stories, special milestones and previously unpublished insights. The year is 2003.
This is how Peter Riedel described his vision of a ski tunnel at the time. Shaped by his father, then the best ski racer in the GDR, Riedel wanted to stamp his mark on winter sports from the very beginning with his technical achievements.
The tinkerer envisioned a facility where temperature, snow conditions and even air pressure could be controlled to create perfect training conditions for cross-country skiers, biathletes and nordic combined athletes year-round.
The era where top athletes had to travel to Scandinavia in summer to train on snow was over. What began on a drawing board quickly drew attention. The German Ski Association showed great interest in the patented ideas from the Ore Mountains and recognized the potential for German elite sport.
Peter Riedel and his team did not merely create a tunnel with snow. The concept envisaged a completely new climate system that would keep snow quality permanently stable—a decisive advance over existing systems in Scandinavia. At the same time, the idea emerged to simulate altitude training under controlled conditions. All decision-makers agreed: this is an idea ahead of its time.
“From a vision on the drawing board, a top-level sports infrastructure used to this day.”
In the following years the vision became a concrete large-scale project. Saxony had the chance to build Germany’s first ski tunnel. In the end the decision favored Oberhof in Thuringia. The ski tunnel was built in 2008 and developed into a unique training facility for Nordic winter sports. To this day top athletes from all Nordic disciplines train there on snow—regardless of season and weather. The facility remains a pioneering example of how innovative sports technology can sustainably transform performance sport.
In retrospect, the ski tunnel was far more than a single project. It already showed early on what Peter Riedel Sports Technology stands for today: thinking in new ways, pushing technical boundaries and turning visions into concrete solutions.
And that was only the beginning ...
In the next episode we tell how a small engineering office in the Ore Mountains gradually grew into an internationally active company.