Gustav Kilian

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Gustav Kilian (* 3. November 1907 in Luxembourg ; † 19th October 2000 in Dortmund ) was a German pro - cyclist and cycling coach .

Racing career

Gustav Kilian competed in 125 six-day races with various partners between 1925 and 1951 . He was on the podium a total of 34 times, 29 of which he shared with his long-term partner Heinz Vopel . This record was only set in 2002 by the Swiss duo Bruno Risi and Kurt Betschart . At the beginning of 1934 the Kilian / Vopel team became a permanent combination at the instigation of Kilian's father.

When the National Socialists issued new competition guidelines on January 1, 1934, the six-day races became unattractive for drivers and spectators, and only two took place in Germany, namely in Dortmund and Berlin. Kilian and Vopel received contracts from the American organizer Spencer after their strong race in London and drove six-day races in the USA until 1941 . There they started in swastika jerseys and showed the Hitler salute . According to other information (based on contemporary sources) they did not start in jerseys with the swastika , but drove in jerseys from their Dürkopp racing team. The association organ Der Deutsche Radfahrer emphasized, however, that the riders “refused to tackle the race in New York because they had attached black, white and red flags to their box as a national flag”. Although the National Socialists rejected six-day races and professional cycling, they adorned themselves with the victories of the duo, which Hermann Göring received and was rewarded in 1938 with 5000 Reichsmarks from the Wilhelm Gustloff Foundation for their “German performance” in the USA . In November 1940, the two drivers were booed by the spectators at the six-day race in Chicago because they had slipped armbands with a swastika on after their victory.

After the end of the Second World War, Kilian competed in more six-day races and added three more victories to his track record, initially as a Luxembourger, since he had reassumed this nationality. In a ranking from 1949, he was the first of the most successful foreign "long-term drivers". He also drove standing races and was on the podium several times at German championships. He ended his active career in 1954.

Success as a trainer

After Kilian had already trained the German four-wheeler ( team pursuit ) in 1960 , his second career began in the same year as national coach of the amateur cyclists. By 1977, athletes he supervised won 16 gold, 13 silver and 7 bronze medals at world championships and the Olympic Games, and the team was nicknamed gold foursome under his aegis . Gustav Kilian, known in Germany as "the goldsmith" and "the iron Gustav", is still one of the most successful cycling trainers worldwide.

One of the darkest hours of Kilian's career as national coach was certainly the final run of the Bahn foursome against Denmark for the gold medal at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico: The German foursome was disqualified in the final because the German driver Jürgen Kissner had touched a teammate. This was rated as "unauthorized pushing" because the French text of the competition regulations valid at the time does not differentiate between "pushing" and "pushing" (French: "pousser"). The Italian team, which was to be given the silver medal instead of the German team, refused to take part in the award ceremony in protest of the jury's decision. In 1969 the IOC executive decided to hand over the silver medals to the BDR foursome despite being disqualified.

In 1977, after the West German four-man defeat against the GDR in the World Cup final in San Cristóbal , Gustav Kilian announced his resignation as national coach on the day of his 70th birthday.

Kilian's training methods were extremely modern, on the one hand benefiting from his own wealth of experience as an athlete and on the other hand modernizing his training in constant dialogue with other trainers. Alongside Emil Beck (fencing) and Karl Adam (rowing), Gustav Kilian was one of the big three among the self-taught coaches in German sport. Kilian's training in athletics was most likely to be compared to Mihály Iglói , as, in addition to the hard training elements , he always paid attention to the smooth step in the sense of style training and stopped training when it could no longer be held.

Honors

Awards

As the coach of the “ gold foursome ”, he and the team were voted Sportsman of the Year 1973 . In 1975 Gustav Kilian was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class and in 1981 the Great Federal Cross of Merit. In 1978 he received the Fair Play trophy from UNESCO , and in the same year the Association of German Cyclists made him an honorary member. On December 12, 1986 Kilian was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia . In 1997, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the German sports press honored him as "Sportsman of the Century". On May 6, 2008, Kilian was inducted into the Hall of Fame of German Sports , an honor that also met with criticism because he was a member of the NSDAP and allowed himself to be courted unduly by the Nazi rulers.

Kilian as namesake

In his hometown of Dortmund, the Gustav-Kilian-Weg was named after him in 2010 near the Borussia Dortmund training center in Brackel .

Familiar

Kilian's son Gus (Gussy) was also active as a professional driver for a few years, but was unable to build on the success of his father.

literature

  • Gerd Rensmann: Alone you are nothing, as a team everything. The iron Gustav tells from his life. Verlag Sportwerbung Steinbrecher, Bork 1977.
  • Wolfgang Gronen, Walter Lemke: History of the bicycle and cycling. Doepgen, Eupen 1978.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Erwien Riep: 12 million people cheered Heinz Vopel and Gustav Kilian . Cycling. Ed .: Association of German Cyclists. German sports publisher Kurt Stoof, Cologne 1955 (series of articles).
  2. ↑ The driver's fees were standardized, and driving should no longer be carried out around the clock. Stars from abroad stayed away because of the disproportionately low fees, and so did the audience. Both races still held in Germany were therefore in deficit for the organizers.
  3. ↑ Illustrated cycling sport , November 2, 1934
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Gronen , Walter Lemke: History of the bicycle. P. 309.
  5. ^ Werner Ruttkus , Wolfgang Schoppe: Round gyro & Berlin air . Self-published by Werner Ruttkus, Zossen 2011, p. 144 .
  6. ^ The German cyclist , December 14, 1937.
  7. ^ The German cyclist , December 1937 and January 1938
  8. ^ Peter Joffre Nye: The Six-Day Bicycle Races. America's Jazz-Age Sport. Van der Plas Publishing, San Francisco CA 2006, ISBN 1-892495-49-X . P. 178.
  9. ^ Richard Blaschke: The cycling sport 1945-1949. Berlin 1950, p. 85.
  10. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: fr-online.de of October 22, 1968@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / original Ausgabe.fr-online.de
  11. ↑ Renate Franz : "The greatest fraud of all time" - How the four-man lost gold at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. In: Cycling4Fans. April 17, 2015, accessed April 18, 2015 .
  12. ^ Arnd Krüger : The History of Middle and Long Distance Running in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, pp. 117 - 124, in: ARND KRÜGER & ANGELA TEJA (eds.): La Comune Eredità dello Sport in Europe. Atti del 1º Seminario Europeo di Storia dello Sport. Rome: Scuola dello Sport - CONI, 1997.
  13. ↑ Merit holders since 1986. (PDF) State Chancellery of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, accessed on March 11, 2017 .
  14. ↑ hall-of-fame-sport.de ( Memento from August 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Brown spots in the hall of fame. on: sueddeutsche.de , March 5, 2008.
  16. ↑ Stadtanzeiger Dortmund - Ostanzeiger , No. 19, January 19, 2011
  17. ^ Association of German cyclists (ed.): Radsport . No. 2/1962 . Deutscher Sportverlag Kurt Stoof, Cologne 1962, p. 8 .


personal data
SURNAME Kilian, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German racing cyclist
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Luxembourg
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 2000
Place of death Dortmund