Takeoff track with an interesting past

RASCHAU/RAMSAU, November 23 – The Austrian Ski Association’s test track continues to make waves: what Peter Riedel GmbH has put together in a short time is consistently attracting interest and enthusiasm in the international ski jumping community. Experts and enthusiasts repeatedly gather in Ramsau am Dachstein to view the facility in person. Training and testing can, of course, only be conducted by Austrian athletes there.

To give credit where it is due, it had actually begun much earlier, about 40 years ago! There, Eberhard Riedel, the former East German alpine star (winner in Adelboden 1961, three-time Olympic participant), wrote his diploma thesis on a topic in ski jumping. The lengthy title in 1974 was: “The Influence of Ski Tension, Base, and Ski Preparation on Takeoff Speed in Ski Jumping.” That sounded both poetic and like a lot of work. “Ebs” Riedel built a 120-meter test track in Oberwiesenthal at the foot of the Fichtelberg ski jump, conducting around 900 attempts with different ski brands and base types. He recognized the immense importance of the sliding friction between snow, ice, and skis and that it had to be reduced to positively influence speed factors. He concluded that a permanent test track with stationary measuring equipment is less prone to disruption than a provisional facility.

The insights of Eberhard Riedel were not given the due respect in the DDR, let’s say. After all, it was ski jumping, a sport practiced by a select few – and for them one would have to allocate additional funds. Moreover, athletes’ feedback was not universally positive. Jochen Danneberg, for example, criticized that using Riedel’s proposed methods in the takeoff track would be faster than necessary.

Thus the diploma thesis fell into obscurity, and it is also the merits of his son that bring the father back into the limelight of ski jumping. Peter Riedel is an internationally recognized expert in the field of takeoff-track construction for ski jumps, designing, producing, and building in Japan as well as in Russia and Central or Northern Europe, and further developing his portfolio based on the work of “Ebs” Riedel.

And then came the year 2013, in which one of the world’s most important ski associations, the Austrian one, formed a partnership with Riedel and REHAU and set a clear mandate: to create a permanent test track in Ramsau am Dachstein.

More about Eberhard and Peter Riedel in their book “Spuren des Erfolgs”, available to order on Amazon at www.amazon.de/Spuren-Erfolgs-Skifahren-Skisprung-Erzgebirge/dp/3902480793/ref=sr_1_1