Herma Bauma

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Hermine Leopoldine "Herma" Bauma (born January 23, 1915 in Vienna ; † February 9, 2003 there ) was an Austrian athlete and handball player . With a height of 1.61 m, her competition weight was 68 kg.

Life

Herma Bauma won the only gold medal for Austria so far in an athletics competition at the Olympic Games.

Bauma came across the javelin by chance and in 1931, at the age of 16, after only one month of training, she became Austrian champion for the first time. On August 1, 1934, Herma Bauma was second with 40.30 m at the Women's World Games, which were then considered the world championships. In 1936, she qualified with a new European record of 45.71 m for the Olympic Games in Berlin , where, impaired by an elbow injury, she missed the bronze medal by ten centimeters with 41.66 m and took fourth place.

At the Olympic Games in London she was on July 31, 1948 with 45.57 m Olympic champion (this distance meant Olympic record at the time). Her preparations for these games hadn't gone optimally, because an almond operation and blood poisoning had thrown her out of training for weeks, and she had been discharged from the hospital, the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Spital in Vienna, with a heart problem. The journey of the Austrian team with special wagons (but wooden benches) to Ostend and from there via Dover to London took 32 hours.

Bauma also set a new world record twice (on June 29, 1947 in Vienna with 48.21 m and on September 12, 1948 also in Vienna with 48.63 m). In August 1950 she won the silver medal with 43.87 m at the European Championships in Brussels . After the Olympic Games in Helsinki in 1952 , where she was ninth with 42.54 m, she ended her athletics career.

Memorial plaque for Herma Bauma in the Ernst Happel Stadium

From 1931 to 1952 she won 15 Austrian championship titles in javelin, three of which (from 1941 to 1943) during the period of annexation to the Third Reich. In July 1942 she was also German champion in the Berlin Olympic Stadium . 14 times she improved the Austrian record in javelin throw from 36.31 m (1931) to 48.63 m (1948). Her last record as the Austrian record was only exceeded in 1959 by Erika Strasser with 48.99 m. In 1932, 1933 and 1947 Bauma was also the Austrian pentathlon champion .

As a field handball player , she was a member of the Austrian national team for years and won numerous Austrian championship titles with her club Danubia. At the field handball world championship in 1949 she was runner-up with the team.

After her Olympic victory in 1948, Bauma was accepted into the federal service. Before retiring in 1977, she was in charge of the Südstadt sports center near Vienna, which opened in 1975 . Bauma was also politically active, after 1945 she became involved with the FÖJ, a predecessor of the KPÖ .

In 1996 she received the Golden Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria . When the Austrian sports journalists named “Austria's Sportsman of the Century” in 1999, she was ranked second behind Annemarie Moser-Pröll.

Herma Bauma rests in an honorary grave in the Südwestfriedhof (group 3, number 19) in Vienna. In 2006 the Herma-Bauma-Gasse in Vienna- Landstrasse (3rd district) was named after her.

literature

Web links

Commons : Herma Bauma  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. «On“ Book Oak ”to the gold medal” . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna July 31, 1978, p. 12 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  2. Clemens Zavarsky: When the nation's favorites become politicians. Kiesl, Fritz and Voves from the ice. In: krone.at. September 4, 2017. Retrieved September 8, 2017 .
  3. List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)