AC Wals

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The Athletic Club Wals is an Austrian wrestling club from the Salzburg municipality of Wals-Siezenheim .

The club was founded in 1952 and is today with 46 team championship titles and over 600 individual titles, including over 300 in the general class, the most successful wrestling club in Austria and current Austrian state league champion. In the course of history, AC Wals provided a large number of Austrian Olympic, World and European Championship participants, including greats such as Bartl Brötzner I and Franz Berger .

Prehistory of wrestling in Salzburg

The martial arts , which includes the rings is numbered among, held in Austria in the early 1870s feeder. In 1890, master self-maker Lorenz founded the "First Salzburg Athletics Club" in Salzburg . The sport was practiced by the active at the Krimpelstätter inn in the Mülln district of Salzburg . The ring sport was organized in Salzburg only after the Second World War . The first club to include wrestling as a separate section in its program after 1945 was the Salzburger AK 1914 . At the Olympic Games in 1948 the Nonntaler already had two participants, but the wrestling section at the SAK could not last long and was dissolved again in 1952.

Club history

Founding history (1952–1960)

In order to keep wrestling alive in Salzburg, Matthias "Hias" Berger, the brother of the later world-class athlete Franz Berger, founded the Athletic Club Wals in 1952 by popular request. The majority of the team was initially made up of the martial arts athletes who had been transferred from the dissolved section of the SAK, but among them were the first real Walser wrestlers, the Brötzner brothers. The first figurehead of the AC Wals was Bartl Brötzner (I) . He originally wanted to pursue a career as a boxer, but in 1947, after observing a training session by the SAK wrestlers, he decided to wrestle and in his career he had three Olympic competitions, ten individual and nine team titles at the Austrian state championships and one team title the AC Bad Reichenhall at the German championships.

The training conditions in the early days show how difficult it was to set up the new club in a community with a population of just 1,000 (at that time) without its own tradition in this sport. The Walser wrestlers had to clean the only mat in their "training room", a Walser Gasthausstüberl, before use, as it served as a sleeping mat for the inn owner's pets during the day. Despite these difficult circumstances, AC Wals achieved its first prestige success with the posting of Bartl Brötzner to the 1952 Olympic Games . Brötzner fought his way up to the medal ranks in his second Olympic participation and was able to achieve fifth place as the best result. At the Games in Australia in 1956 , the Walsers already had two participants, Bartl Brötzner and Eugen Wiesberger, who represented Austria and AC Wals with fourth and seventh places.

The first decades (1960–1980)

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Franz Berger from Walser was one of the national and international top athletes with 27 national championship titles in the general class and four Olympic participations (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972). Berger celebrated his greatest success by winning the bronze medal at the 1970 European Championships in East Berlin . Another figurehead of the Walser was the Olympic participant and thirteen-time national champion Josef Brötzner in the 1970s . Despite all its success, the AC Wals was still a down-to-earth club at that time, whose athletes came exclusively from their own youngsters and mostly from the municipality of Wals-Siezenheim. So it is not surprising that the club started with a team in the mid-1970s that included nine athletes with the family name "Brötzner". Since a "family member" or friend stood on the mat in almost every fight and the population of the double community streamed into the hall en masse, the competitions were always held in a completely sold out hall. This significantly influenced the further positive development of the AC Wals and gave the community the nickname “ THE wrestling community in Austria ”.

In the 1980s, it was primarily the Olympic starters and often national champions Bartholomäus Brötzner II , Georg Marchl and Alexander Neumüller who determined the club's activities. At world and European championships in the 80s the Walsers were able to succeed especially in the youth and junior classes thanks to Georg Marchl and Georg Neumaier .

Development since 1990

In 1992, AC Wals provided Anton Marchl, the last native Walser Olympian to date. Due to a large number of failures in the youth field, but also to the great successes of the Austria Salzburg football club , which in the wake of these successes increasingly attracted young people to the football fields, the young wrestlers stagnated at the Flachgau. This forced the AC Wals to increasingly rely on legionnaires since the mid-1990s . The people of Salzburg repeatedly attracted attention with sensational transfers. For example, the Finn Ari Härkänen, the Belarusian Aleksander Shemarow, the Slovak Radion Kertanti and the Georgian Amiran Elbakidse fought for the Walser Wrestling Club. In 1997, Nina Strasser won third place at the European Championships in Warsaw for the first medal for the Walser women's division. At the 2004 Sydney Games , AC Wals was represented by naturalized freestyle wrestlers Lubos Cikel and Radovan Valach .

In the past season, AC Wals achieved its 41st team championship title in the state league ahead of KSK Klaus . The second team also took first place in the national league (second level). Florian Marchl and Amer Hrustanovic were voted Salzburg's “Wrestlers of the Year” in 2006 for their sporting achievements.

successes

Most successful athlete

Note: In this list, only individual titles in the order of national champions / juniors / youth are taken into account.

Men

Women

Club management

  • President: Ludwig Bieringer
  • 1st Vice President: Gerhard Schöppl
  • 2nd Vice-President: Paul Santner
  • Chairman: Anton Marchl
  • Vice chairman: Josef Burger and Andreas Bacher

literature

  • Joachim Glaser: Salzburg athlete. Publisher Anton Pustet. Salzburg - Munich 2001. ISBN 3-7025-0426-5

Web links