Horst Hüttel

Horst Hüttel (2020)

Horst Hüttel (born August 20, 1968 in Weißenstadt ) is a German sports official and has been responsible for the Nordic Combined discipline since 2006 at the German Ski Association (DSV) and has also been responsible for the ski jumping discipline since 2008 .

From May 2006 to September 2019 he was responsible for the overall system as the sporting director. In October 2019, he was given the position of team manager for the national ski jumping and Nordic combined teams at the DSV.

He has been chairman of the Nordic Combined Executive Committee in the International Ski Federation (FIS) since 2013 . Hüttel lives in Wunsiedel and is married and has two children.

Athletic career

From 1985 to 1992 Hüttel was a member of the German national ski team in the Nordic Combined discipline and in 1989, together with Thomas Dufter and Hubert Schwarz, won the German championship title in the team. From 1992 to 1995 he was a junior trainer at the Elite School of Sports in Berchtesgaden and in September 1995 he graduated as a qualified trainer at the Cologne Trainer Academy . In the period from 1995 to 2002, Hüttel worked as a trainer in various junior squads of the German Ski Association. From 2002 to 2006 he was the general head coach in the areas of young talent and Nordic combined. During this period, the German juniors became world champions or runners-up in all competitions, a record that has been unique in the history of the Nordic Junior World Championships. Horst Hüttel has been a sports official since May 2006.

Sports official in the German Ski Association

Nordic Combined discipline

The Nordic combined developed continuously under his sporting direction into one of the most successful sports in Germany. Together with national trainer Hermann Weinbuch , he worked intensively as a sports director from 2006 to 2019 on the strategic and methodological development of the sport. He has been working here since 2019.

From a competitive sporting point of view, the seasons 2014 to 2018 were outstanding and unique, when some athletes under the sporting direction of Hüttel dominated the event at times at will:

In the 2016/17 season, German athletes won 23 of 25 World Cups and took 1,2,4,5 places in the overall World Cup ranking. At the World Championships in Lahti / FIN in February 2017, the team achieved a four-fold victory in the normal hill competition (1st Johannes Rydzek / 2nd Eric Frenzel / 3rd Björn Kircheisen / 4th Fabian Rießle ), Rydzek also won all four possible World Championships - title. In 2018 at the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang / KOR, the German team repeated the triple success on the normal hill (1st Rydzek / 2nd Rießle / 3rd Frenzel). In addition, the team became Olympic champion in the team competition and Eric Frenzel won the gold medal on the large hill. From 2013 to 2017, Eric Frenzel won the individual World Cup five times in a row and the team won the Nations World Cup five times. In addition, Eric Frenzel won the Nordic Combined Triple in Seefeld / AUT four times in a row from 2014 to 2017, making it the sole leader in these two categories for the near future. Eric Frenzel was the most successful Nordic combined athlete at the 2019 World Championships in Seefeld; in addition to the individual title, he also won the team sprint with Fabian Rießle. The team with Johannes Rydzek, Eric Frenzel, Fabian Rießle (SZ Breitnau) and Vinzenz Geiger (SC Oberstdorf) was runner-up in 2019 .

Ski jumping discipline

After two successful years as the sporting director in the Nordic Combined, Hüttel was also given sporting responsibility for the ski jumping discipline in 2008. At this time, German ski jumping was in a sporting crisis and no German ski jumper was among the top 15 in the overall World Cup ranking. One of his first official acts in the spring of 2008 was the engagement of Werner Schuster from Mieming as the new national coach. This was the first time that a foreign national coach was hired in the ski jumping discipline. Werner Schuster was followed in April 2019 by the Austrian Stefan Horngacher, who previously successfully looked after the Polish ski jumping team and had already worked for the German Ski Association in previous years.

In the following years, together with Schuster, Hüttel succeeded in bringing German ski jumping back to the top of the world and establishing it there with new concepts and ideas. Above all, the youth system was reformed and restructured under the leadership of Hüttels. Although the first few years did not yet produce the hoped-for success, Hüttel stuck to existing concepts and modified them further. The sporting breakthrough came in 2014: at the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, the ski jumping team became Olympic champion and Severin Freund became world ski flying champion in Harrachov. In the 2014/15 season Severin Freund became double world champion and overall world cup winner. At the 2017 World Championships in Lahti / FIN, Andreas Wellinger of the normal hill and large hill was runner-up and world champion in mixed. At the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang / KOR, the team won the silver medal and Andreas Wellinger was Olympic champion on the normal hill. Horst Hüttel has also been responsible for women's ski jumping as the sporting director since 2008. When the IOC announced in 2011 that women’s ski jumping would be included in the Olympic program, Horst Hüttel, together with DSV sports director Thomas Pfüller, pushed the activities for women’s ski jumping. He installed Andreas Bauer , who had previously worked in Nordic combined, as the new national coach. In 2012, despite resistance from individual federal states, he developed a concept of centralization for women in the A and B cadre at the Oberstdorf federal base. The successes did not stay away for long, Carina Vogt became the first Olympic champion in the history of women's ski jumping in 2014 and double world champion in 2015 and 2017 (singles and mixed). In 2018 Katharina Althaus won the silver medal at the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang and the team around national coach Andreas Bauer won the Nations World Cup for the first time in 2018, which could be repeated in 2019. In 2019, this series of successes was continued, in addition to winning the Nations Cup again, Katharina Althaus took second place in the overall World Cup after 17 podium places (across all World Cups and World Cups) ahead of her teammate Juliane Seyfarth (TSG Ruhla). The highlight of the 2019 season was the world championships in Seefeld (AUT) where Markus Eisenbichler (TSV Siegsdorf) won the world championship title on the large hill, while Katharina Althaus was vice world champion in the women’s individual competition. The team world championship titles all went to the German Ski Association. In the men's team, team world champion Karl Geiger (ski jumper) (SC Oberstdorf), Richard Freitag (SG Nickelhütte Aue), Stephan Leyhe (SC Willingen) and Markus Eisenbichler, in the women's Juliane Seyfarth, Ramona Straub (SC Langenordnach), Carina Vogt, Katharina Old house. In the mixed team competition held for the first time, Katharina Althaus, Markus Eisenbichler, Juliane Seyfarth and Karl Geiger (ski jumpers) won.

Sports official in the International Ski Federation (FIS)

In May 2013 Horst Hüttel took over the chairmanship of the Nordic Combined Executive Committee of the World Ski Federation from Roman Kumpost / CZE as part of the FIS Congress in Dubrovnik. He is therefore one of the most influential people in this discipline worldwide and decides on the content (competition rules, formats) as well as the basic philosophy and strategy of the discipline. In the first year of his tenure, he installed the new Nordic Combined Triple competition format together with FIS race director Lasse Ottesen / NOR, which has been an integral part of the Ski World Cup ever since. In addition, since the beginning of his tenure, he has been campaigning for more competitions on large hills for Nordic combined. Since 2016 he has been working on a strategy paper for the development and integration of women in Nordic combined. In 2018 women started for the first time at the Summer Grand Prix in Oberwiesenthal and in 2019 for the first time at the Nordic Combined Junior World Championships in Lahti (FIN).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DSV Sports Director Horst Huettel. (No longer available online.) In: Fédération Internationale de Ski . March 3, 2015, archived from the original on February 18, 2017 ; accessed on February 18, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Horst Hüttel takes over chairmanship of the FIS Executive Committee Nordic Combined. In: German Ski Association . June 14, 2013, accessed February 18, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Martin Beils: Why do the Germans fly again? Werner Schuster - the 'knight understand'. In: rp-online.de. December 31, 2008, accessed February 18, 2017 . 
4. ↑ Melanie Haack: Olympic Champion: "The future belongs to Germany's ski jumpers". In: welt.de . February 18, 2014, accessed February 18, 2017 . 
5. ↑ Werner Schuster new national coach. In: spox.com. March 25, 2008. Retrieved February 18, 2017 . 
6. ^ Benedikt Voigt: Four Hills Tournament: Knowledge transfer from Austria. In: zeit.de . December 30, 2012, accessed February 18, 2017 .