Leo Gasperl

Leo Gasperl
nation	Austria
birthday	May 24, 1912
place of birth	Bad Mitterndorf ,  Austria
date of death	March 25, 1997
Place of death	Rivisondoli ,  Italy
Career
discipline	Cross-country skiing Nordic combined ski jumping
society	Kitzbüheler SC

Leo Gasperl (born May 24, 1912 in Bad Mitterndorf , † March 25, 1997 in Rivisondoli , Italy ) was an Austrian ski racer and trainer. He mainly took part in competitions in alpine skiing , less often in ski jumping , won numerous international races in the 1930s and set a new speed record on skis in 1932 . From 1935 he was the coach of the Italian national ski team.

biography

Gasperl grew up in Bad Mitterndorf in Styria and had to cope with the way to elementary school on skis in winter, which is why he got into skiing at an early age. He attended secondary school in Bad Aussee before he went to Kitzbühel in Tyrol at the age of 15 and completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic , which he completed at the end of the 1920s. Gasperl became Austrian youth champion in Mariazell in 1924 , joined the Kitzbühel Ski Club during his apprenticeship and repeatedly took part in regional ski races there. In 1931 he set a new record of 64 meters on the Kitzbühel ski jump and was now at the start of international competitions more and more often. He celebrated his first major international victory on February 7, 1932 in Davos, Switzerland , when he was the first non-Swiss to win the traditional Parsenn Derby downhill race. This victory earned him an invitation to the 3rd kilometer lancé in St. Moritz eight days later . Gasperl won the high-speed race with an average speed of 122 kilometers per hour on the 100-meter measurement route and set a new speed record on skis at 136.3 km / h over the last 50 meters .

In the winter of 1933 Gasperl won, among other things, the downhill race on Monte Canin , a combination in Sestriere and slalom and combination (3rd place in the downhill) of the March ski races in Wengen . At the 1933 World Championships in Innsbruck , he was only used in the alpine disciplines in the unofficial "long descent", which he finished in seventh position, but not in the actual World Championship races. On the other hand, he started - as was rarely the case at the time - in jumping and finished in 17th place. In 1934 Gasperl won the kilometer lancé in St. Moritz for the second time at a speed of 129.263 km / h on the 100-meter test route. In the last 50 meters, he achieved a speed of 135.849 km / h. In the same year he also won a combination in St. Moritz and a downhill run in Abetone . In the winter of 1935 Gasperl achieved another great success when he won three downhill runs of the Coppa del Re ("King's Cup") in Sestriere and thus won the overall ranking of this six-race competition. At the World Championships in Mürren in 1935 , he was tenth in the slalom, while he did not reach the finish in the descent due to a ski break.

In the following years Gasperl only took part in a few ski races, because in 1935 he took over the training of the Italian national team, initially to prepare them for the 1936 Winter Olympics . Giacinto Sertorelli , Vittorio Chierroni , Alberto Marcellin and Zeno Colò , who broke Gasperl's 15-year-old speed record in 1947, were among the best Italian racers of the time . Gasperl dealt in detail with the technique of skiing and developed the "Gasperl parallel turn" named after him. The cooperation with the Italian national team ended after the World Cup in 1941, when the Second World War largely brought skiing to a standstill. Gasperl, who married the Italian Luciana Albano in 1937, stayed in Italy. After the end of the war, he set up a ski school in his new home in Breuil-Cervinia and ran a sports shop, for which he designed his own clothing line. For a long time he worked as a ski instructor for prominent guests, including members of various royal families and aristocratic families. He participated in several films, such as Luis Trenker's Im Banne des Monte Miracolo , made his own ski film in 1948 called L'eleganza della piega and wrote several books about skiing.

successes

World championships

• Innsbruck 1933: 7th long descent (unofficial) , 17th jump run
• Mürren 1935: 10th slalom

Victories in FIS races

• Departure of the Parsenn derby in Davos in 1932
• Slalom and combination of the March ski races in Wengen 1933
• Combination in Sestriere 1933
• Departure from Monte Canin in 1933
• Combination in St. Moritz 1934
• Departure from Abetone in 1934
• Three runs and overall victory of the Coopa del Re in Sestriere in 1935

More Achievements

• Victories at the Kilomètre Lancé in St. Moritz in 1932 and 1934
• New speed record on skis at KL 1932 (136.3 km / h)

literature

• Austrian Ski Association (Ed.): Austrian Ski Stars from A – Z. Ablinger & Garber, Hall in Tirol 2008, ISBN 978-3-9502285-7-1 , pp. 92-93.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reinhard Straumann: The 3rd kilometer lancé on skis in St. Moritz. In: The mountain hare. Yearbook of the Swiss Academic Ski Club. Vol. 2, No. 6, 1932, pp. 240-244.
2. ^ ^{A b} Walter Amstutz : The Kilometer Lancé on Skis - Speed ​​Skiing. In: The mountain hare. Yearbook of the Swiss Academic Ski Club. No. 34, 1986-1990. Pp. 87-96.
3. ↑ 5th kilometer lancé. In: The mountain hare. Yearbook of the Swiss Academic Ski Club. Vol. 3, No. 8, 1934, p. 113.
4. ↑ The Austrian Zingerle wins the downhill run. In:  Sportblatt am Mittag / Sport-Tagblatt. Sports edition of the Neue Wiener Tagblatt , February 26, 1935, p. 4 (online at ANNO ).