Hans Renner (ski jumper)

Hans Renner
Hans Renner (right) with Horst Queck
nation	German Democratic Republic
birthday	August 9, 1919
place of birth	Bärringen ,  Czechoslovakia
date of death	July 10, 1970
Career
National squad	since 1937

Hans Renner (born August 9, 1919 in Bärringen , Czechoslovakia , † July 10, 1970 ) was a German ski jumper and ski jumping coach.

After a short active career , Renner was the trainer of the GDR ski jumpers between 1954 and 1970 , including Helmut Recknagel , whom he led to Olympic victory in 1960. In addition, with the invention of the plastic mat , he laid the foundation for today's summer ski jumping.

origin

The father of Hans Renner and his brother Ernst was Walter Renner, a master tailor in Bärringen. Walter Renner and his wife lived there until they were expelled in June 1945. After the war and as a prisoner of war, Hans came to what was then the GDR, his brother to the FRG .

Career

Renner became a member of the German national ski jumping team at the age of 18, but was only able to actively practice the sport for a short time because he was used as an officer in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front during the Second World War . After the war, Renner was taken prisoner by the Soviets and was sent to a prison camp in Siberia for five years before settling down as a “ late returnee ” in Zella-Mehlis , Thuringia , in the early 1950s , where he initially continued his active career and among other things participated in the GDR championships. At that time, since 1951, he already held the position of chairman of the commission in the presidium of the German Skier Association of the GDR.

In the winter of 1953/54 Renner finally ended his career and became a ski jumping trainer at SC Motor Zella-Mehlis . At the same time, he took over the management of the GDR national ski jumping team, which he led to the Nordic World Ski Championships in Falun in 1954 , in which East German athletes took part for the first time. The world championships were unsuccessful: the best GDR ski jumper was Franz Renner , who finished 50th out of 69 participants. Werner Lesser and Harry Glaß , who placed 53 and 64, did even worse .

After the unsuccessful World Championship, Renner set himself the goal of making the athletes he supervised competitive. He saw the way there in a particularly tough training, which in his opinion should start in the summer. As early as the 1920s, there had been attempts to hold ski jumping in summer on hills covered with straw and pine needles . However, these never caught on. Renner visited the Leipzig trade fair to get new ideas and came across the plastic polyvinyl chloride (PVC). By chance - one morning Tau had moistened the PVC sheets standing in front of Renner's front door - the trainer found out that the plastic had the sliding properties necessary for a ski jump when it was moistened. He implemented the idea and covered a small hill near Zella-Mehlis with the PVC mats, on which he let his ski jumpers complete their first jumps, which he rated positively:

"Our attempts with our later known jumpers like Harry Glaß, Werner Lesser and Helmut Recknagel not only confirmed the usefulness of this artificial training hill , but also the correctness of the training preparation for snow substitute."

The first public mat ski jumping took place on November 20, 1954 with 15,000 spectators on today's youth ski jump in Oberhof . Hans Renner had his idea patented , which spread in the following years in many other countries, and earned from license fees until his death . Until the mid-1970s, the plastic mats were also only allowed to be manufactured in the GDR and were a " high-currency export hit" for the country .

Harry Glaß, Manfred Brunner , Werner Lesser, Hans Renner and Helmut Recknagel (from left to right)

From September 1955, Renner prepared the East German ski jumpers - Glaß, Lesser and Helmut Recknagel, whom he recruited in early 1954 - for the next major event, the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo . The GDR athletes were extremely successful in these: Glaß led after the first round and finally won the bronze medal; Werner Lesser came in eighth. A significant part of this increase in performance was attributed to Hans Renner, who was responsible on the one hand for the summer training sessions and on the other hand for the switch to a more aerodynamic jumping style . After the Olympic Winter Games, the GDR remained successful in ski jumping, particularly thanks to Helmut Recknagel, who was the first German to triumph at Holmenkollen in 1957 and who won the Olympic gold three years later in Squaw Valley . Hans Renner remained a trainer in Zella-Mehlis until 1966 before he took over the position of association trainer. Four years later, he died suddenly at the age of 50, shortly before his 51st birthday.

Renner received several honors during his lifetime: In 1958 the GDR Vice President Walter Ulbricht awarded him and his athletes Harry Glaß, Werner Lesser and Helmut Recknagel the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze, honoring Renner's "proven educational and sports science management". Two years later, Defense Minister Willi Stoph awarded him the “Labor Banner” after Recknagel's Olympic victory. In 1998 the ski jumping facility in Kanzlersgrund , the largest ski jumping hill in East Germany, was named after Hans Renner.

Relationship with the athletes

In his autobiography A Question of Attitude , Helmut Recknagel describes his long-time trainer as a “tough dog”. He was used by the ski jumpers, but everyone respected him. As an example, the former athlete gives Renner's behavior during the Four Hills Tournament in 1955/56 , which was also considered to be Olympic qualification. The 18-year-old Recknagel failed the tour and left early, whereupon Renner published a comment in the German Sportecho with the title “Recknagel is afraid of large jumps”. To be portrayed as a coward was unbearable for Recknagel, but the two never talked about the incident later because they were not able to do so.

Private

After his death in July 1970, Hans Renner left behind his wife Gretel, his daughter Angelika (married Furch) and his grandson Nicki.

literature

• The story of how Hans became a master . In: Manfred Seifert: Great love of skiing . Sportverlag Berlin, 1978, p. 82ff.
• Helmut Recknagel: It's a question of attitude . Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-360-01298-2 .
• Michael Krauß: The ancestral lists of genealogy Krauss , Brandenburg an der Havel 2016, p. 72.

Web links

Commons : Hans Renner  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} The story of how Hans became a master . In: Manfred Seifert: Great love of skiing . Sportverlag Berlin, 1978. P. 82ff.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Recknagel, p. 33f.
3. ↑ The invention of plastic mats. skisprungschanzen.com
4. ↑ Recknagel, p. 88.
5. ↑ Recknagel, p. 46f.