Reinhard Blum (gymnast)

Reinhard Blum doing an endo straddle on the horizontal bar.

Reinhard Blum (born November 10, 1968 ) is Austria's most successful gymnast of the late 1980s. Between 1985 and 1991 he won 14 national championship titles, including four times the most important title in the all-around competition.

Promotion in the Olympic model in 1988

Reinhard Blum wanted to get into art cycling when he was eight; The gymnastics club was recommended to him as an athletic preparation. So in 1976 he started training in the Fußach gymnastics club . When the first successes were achieved, he stayed with gymnastics and was sent by the TS Fußach from 1978 to the national team of the Dornbirn regional sports center. In the late 1970s, the Vorarlberg Gymnastics Association had promoted the promotion of young talent, and from 1982 the association received financial support from Sporthilfe: The so-called “Olympic model 1988” was initiated. It was designed to train a large number of talents for the requirements of the IOC limit for the Summer Olympics. The Hungarian trainer Dezső Bordan, who trained Reinhard Blum from 1985 to 1992, was employed with these sponsorships from Sporthilfe.

Success with Hungarian know-how

Reinhard Blum at the final of the artistic gymnastics days in the Bregenz Festival Hall in 1987.

In international gymnastics, the countries of the Eastern Bloc were superior to the Western nations until its collapse in 1989. In the communist Eastern European countries (including Hungary) there were full-time trainers with university degrees and an excellent infrastructure.

Above all, the contacts with top Hungarian gymnasts mediated by trainer Dezső Bordan and his knowledge increased the performance of the Vorarlberg gymnasts, of whom Reinhard Blum and later Thomas Zimmermann and Marco Baldauf were the most successful.

State champion title from Reinhard Blum:

• 1985 pommel horse
• 1987 pommel horse, jump
• 1988 all around, ground
• 1989 all around, ground
• 1990 all-around, pommel horse, rings, jump, horizontal bar
• 1991 all-around, parallel bars

At the international level, Reinhard Blum represented Austria at five world championships and six European championships. In 1988 he won the pommel horse final of the Medico Cup in Bregenz, at the 1990 European Championships in Lausanne he was 11th on the vault and at the 1992 World Cup he reached 21st place on the horizontal bar. His greatest success - the IOC limit for the Olympics - led to conflicts and in 1992 to his resignation.

Denied participation in the Olympic Games and resignation

Reinhard Blum's greatest goal, but also for the Vorarlberg gymnastics club (1988 Olympic model), was to qualify for the Summer Olympics. In his international assignments, Reinhard Blum fulfilled the IOC's criteria for the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988 and also for Barcelona in 1992. However, the Austrian Olympic Committee ( ÖOC ) set the limit higher than the international association. Reinhard Blum was denied participation in the Olympics by the national committee. The disappointment with Austrian sports policy led to his resignation in 1992. Supported by the Austrian Armed Forces, the former sports soldier at the Army Sports Center began his professional training.

Blum (right) with a trainer colleague and gymnasts at the Swiss Junior Championships in Artistic Gymnastics 2019.

From 1996 to 2017 Reinhard Blum was the head coach of the Rheintal gymnastics center in Switzerland. Since then he has been working as a trainer at the regional performance center in Eastern Switzerland.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Association magazine with information on the 1988 Olympic model (see p. 3; PDF file; 1.48 MB)

Web links

Commons : Reinhard Blum  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Homepage of the Vorarlberg Association for Gymnastics (VTS)

literature

• Otto Gratt (among others): 50 years of Vorarlberg gymnastics, 1946–1996. Anniversary font . Published in April 1996