Josef Gumpold

Josef Gumpold
nation	Austria , German Empire
birthday	September 3, 1908
place of birth	Böckstein , Badgastein municipality ,  Austria-Hungary
job	Painter and house painter, department store clerk
date of death	December 6, 1942
Place of death	Russia
Career
discipline	Cross-country skiing Nordic combined ski jumping
society	Badgastein ski club, Innsbruck ski club, Partenkirchen ski club

Josef "Sepp" Gumpold (born September 3, 1908 in Böckstein , Badgastein municipality , Kronland Salzburg , † December 6, 1942 in Russia ) was an Austrian and German swimmer and Nordic winter sportsman. He ran all three Nordic disciplines, but was particularly successful in ski jumping and Nordic combined .

Career

Gumpold grew up in the Gastein Valley and dealt early with all known types of winter sports. He worked as a painter and house painter in his hometown , but after moving to Innsbruck got a job in the renowned sports shop Sport-Hummel in Maria-Theresien-Straße. At club level, he first started for the Badgastein ski club and, after moving to the Tyrolean State Ski Association, for the Innsbruck ski club. Gumpold was one of a number of well-known and successful winter sports enthusiasts from the Province of Salzburg who, due to the inadequate funding of the Salzburg State Ski Association at the time, let themselves be lured away by the geographically neighboring State Ski Associations of Tyrol and Carinthia.

In 1934 he was nominated by the ÖSV for the Nordic World Ski Championships in Sollefteå . After his arrest in February 1934 for illegal political activities for the National Socialists in Austria, he was banned from national and international sports competitions by the association. As a result, he left Austria, took German citizenship in 1935 and settled in Garmisch-Partenkirchen . As a member of the Partenkirchen ski club, he took part in the 1936 Winter Olympics for the German Ski Association in his new home town.

On December 6, 1942, Gumpold , who had the rank of private , fell while serving as a group leader of a ski commando in Russia.

His brother Karl was also active as a Nordic skier and took part in the Nordic World Ski Championships in Innsbruck in 1933 .

successes

One of his greatest successes was the sixth place in the ski jump on the Bergiselschanze at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Innsbruck in 1933 . This makes him the first Nordic athlete in the state of Salzburg to achieve a top 6 placement at the Nordic World Ski Championships.

At the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936 , where he started for the German Reich after changing his nationality, he finished 13th in the Nordic Combined.

Movie

As a skier , Josef Gumpold doubled the actress Leni Riefenstahl in the 1931 film " The White Rush " .

Trivia

In 1936 the then newly constructed K70 normal hill in Murau was named after him.

In his home town of Bad Gastein , the ski club there dedicated to Josef Gumpold and other Böckstein ski pioneers such as Peter Müller, Karl Seer and Viktor Eichmann a 2.5 meter high cross, carved by Hermann Leitner around 1950, south of the mountain station of the Graukogel lift on an old one Stone pine was attached. Today this cross is dedicated to the memory of all mountain and ski friends of the ski club.

At the military cemetery in Böckstein there is still a metal cross in memory of Josef Gumpold.

successes

winter Olympics

winter Olympics	competition
	Cross-country skiing 18 km	Cross-country skiing 50 km	Relay 4 × 10 km	Ski jumping	North. Comb.
1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen	-	-	-	-	13.

Nordic World Ski Championships

Nordic World Ski Championships	competition
	Cross-country skiing 18 km	Cross-country skiing 50 km	Relay 4 × 10 km	Ski jumping	North. Comb.
1931 Oberhof	-	-	-	24.	-
1933 Innsbruck	63.	-	-	6th	17th
1934 Sollefteå	DNS	-	DNS	-	DNS
1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen	-	-	-	-	13.

Hill records

place	country	Expanse	set up on	Record up
innsbruck	Austria	70.5 m ( K -70)	February 12, 1933	February 13, 1933

Web links

• Josef Gumpold in the database of the International Ski Association (English)
• Josef Gumpold on The-Sports.org
• Photo by Josef Gumpold in the Europeana

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Personal data on Gumpold at SR / Olympic Sports
2. ↑ (belated) death report from February 10, 1943 in the ANP archive ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
3. ↑ Brief interview with Gumpold in the Prager Tagblatt from February 24, 1932
4. ↑ Murauer Schanzenkessel on Skisprungschanzen.com