Sport in Thuringia
The main focus of sport in Thuringia is on winter sports . Oberhof is one of the most important winter sports centers in Germany and offers arenas for international competitions with ski jumping facilities, bobsleigh and toboggan runs and a biathlon stadium. Speed skating has found an important base in Erfurt . The two most successful soccer teams are FC Rot-Weiß Erfurt and FC Carl Zeiss Jena . Schleiz Dreieck is located in Schleiz - a circuit used for motorcycle and vintage car races and the only racing track in Thuringia . The bike classic around the Hainleite is Germany's oldest cycling race that is still being driven.
In the Landessportbund Thüringen e. V. are organized in 3,424 associations with 370,579 members; that is about 17.7% of the Thuringian population (as of 2017).
history
The beginnings of gymnastics and winter sports
At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, Thuringia provided decisive impulses for the development of a modern physical culture. Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths developed physical education in Germany at the Salzmann School of Education founded in 1784 in Schnepfenthal (now part of Waltershausen ) . In Germany as a whole, his ideas remained unrealized for the time being. In the end, it was left to the “gymnastics father” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to popularize the practice of physical exercise.
The Jahn protégés Hans Ferdinand Maßmann (1797–1874) and Christian Leopold Dürre (1796–1879) helped the Jenaer fraternity in 1816 to set up a university gymnasium. Jahn's student Johann Karl Friedrich Salomo (1794–1860) worked in the Prussian part of Thuringia. He organized the first Thuringian gymnastics festival, which took place in Erfurt on August 3, 1818 and was attended by 600 schoolchildren and students.
Numerous gymnasts took part in the Wartburg Festival in 1817 . But the urge for unity and freedom was stifled by the demagogue persecution that began in 1819. In January 1820 a royal decree appeared in Prussia , which made gymnastics a punishable offense.
The state-prescribed school gymnastics, initially only for the boys, began in the Thuringian states from 1848/50 (Prussia 1842/44). The club gymnastics developed in Thuringia around the years of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848/49 . The first gymnastics club in Thuringia was the Schmölln gymnastics club, founded in 1846 .
On 17./18. June 1860 the 1st German Gymnastics Festival took place in Coburg, then Thuringia .
In the middle of the 1880s, the first sports clubs in Thuringia were the cycling clubs. B. 1883 in Erfurt and 1884 in Nordhausen. On 21/22 May 1893 the "German Workers' Gymnastics Association" was founded in the Russian industrial city of Gera. From then on, Gera remained a center of workers' sport in the Thuringian region.
After numerous football clubs also devoted themselves to athletic exercises, the 1st Thuringian Gaume Championship in athletics was held in Erfurt in 1906.
While other sports had their origins in the big cities, the development of winter sports in Thuringia had played an important role for the whole of Germany. After in spring 1905 on the initiative of the Oberhof doctor Dr. Kurt Weidhaas the "Thuringian Winter Sports Association" was founded, skiing, tobogganing and bobsleigh in particular experienced a rapid boom. The centers of winter sports were in Thuringia a. a. Oberhof , Friedrichroda , Brotterode , Ilmenau and Neuhaus am Rennweg . For tourist reasons, winter sports facilities such as B. 1906 a bobsleigh run and ski jump in Friedrichroda and 1908/09 in Oberhof the large ski jump on Wadeberg.
With the help of Norwegian ski instructors, the Thuringians achieved top positions in the German winter sports championships not only in bobsleigh, but also in Nordic skiing. The outstanding athlete of that time was Ernstthaler Karl Böhm-Hennes , who became German and Austrian champion in Nordic combined in 1911 .
Football is coming to Thuringia
The young sports movement received the strongest impetus from football . The first game according to English rules in Thuringia was played in Jena in 1893 , and in 1896 the Jena rules for football came into force. The SC Erfurt in 1895 and the FC Germania 1899 Mulhouse were the only Thuringian representatives at the inaugural meeting of the German Football Association on 28 January 1900 in Leipzig . The following years marked the birth of numerous football clubs (1901: Gotha, 1902: Barchfeld / Werra, 1903: Weimar, Jena, Altenburg and Eisfeld, 1904: Gera, Meiningen and Sonneberg).
The Thuringian state championship, which was held for the first time in 1904, was won by SC Erfurt, which played a leading role in Thuringian football until 1914 and was able to assert itself against the strong Leipzig clubs in the 1909 battle for the Central German Championship of the Association of Central German Ball Game Clubs . Even at that time, the footballers from Jena were the main rivals of Erfurt in Thuringia.
Sport in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich
The years of the Weimar Republic brought the gymnastics and sports movement a great boom. The sport finally assumed mass character.
Karl Möbius (1897–1965) from Saalfeld , who was German champion in the pole vault in 1926, was one of the long-standing successes in athletics . In football, the SC Erfurt, the Spielvereinigung Erfurt, the 1. SV Jena and the SV Preußen Langensalza fought for the crown in Thuringia and to catch up with the Central German top.
The FIS competitions (unofficial world championships of the International Ski Association) and two-man bobsleigh world championships held in Oberhof in 1931, as well as the Germany-Switzerland athletics match held in Weimar in 1932, were the first major international events in Thuringia.
Soon after the start of National Socialism in 1933, traditional workers' sports clubs were banned in Thuringia, non-Aryan athletes were excluded from gymnastics and sports clubs, and clubs were brought into line. In Thuringia, the third gymnastics lesson with military-related content was introduced for boys in school sport as early as 1934.
In the football Gauliga Mitte , introduced in 1933 , the 1. SV Jena remained the only Thuringian team that could keep up with the competition from Dessau, Magdeburg and Halle. Jena became Gaumeister in the seasons 1934/35 , 1935/36 , 1939/40 and 1940/41 . On August 25, 1935, the first international football match on Thuringian soil took place in Erfurt. 37,000 spectators saw the German team beat the guests from Romania 4-2 .
The Suhler sports shooter Erich Krempel (1913-1992) won the 2nd place in pistol shooting at the Olympic Summer Games in Berlin, the first Olympic medal for an athlete from Thuringia.
The Gabelbach races near Ilmenau , a motorsport event , also take place at this time .
Thuringian competitive sport in the GDR
After the Second World War , the Soviet Zone broke with traditional associations. In 1946, municipal sports associations took its place. From 1948 company sports associations were founded in larger companies and institutions , which in 1950 were united in so-called sports associations based on the model of the Soviet Union (e.g. "Motor", "Stahl").
In 1948 the first zone championships took place in some sports . Thuringian athletes won six first places in the athletics championships.
In the GDR , competitive sports received special funding according to the will of the SED leadership, in order to create high reputation and global recognition with international success in sports in the GDR. The first victories - also for Thuringian athletes - were not long in coming. The Erfurt swimmer Jutta Langenau went down in history as the first female European champion from the GDR. Walter Franke from Jena brought the first world championship title to Thuringia with the GDR asphalt bowling team in 1955. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Squaw Valley , special jumper Helmut Recknagel from Steinbach-Hallenberg became the first Thuringian Olympic champion. In the mid-1950s , the state racing collective based at the Eisenach Automobile Plant attracted brief attention with an EMW / AWE racing car .
Over the decades, numerous athletes have been successful, such as the track and field athletes Wolfgang Nordwig , Renate Stecher , Ruth Fuchs , Bärbel Wöckel and Marlies Göhr , the javelin thrower Petra Felke from Jena, the Erfurt swimmer Roland Matthes , the cyclist Olaf Ludwig from Gera, who train in Jena Sled athletes Hans Rinn and Margit Schumann , the biathlete Frank Ullrich or the bobsleigh athletes Meinhard Nehmer and Wolfgang Hoppe as well as the cross-country skier Gerhard Grimmer from Floh-Seligenthal , who became two-time world champion in 1974 and won the famous Wasa run.
Competitive sport was supported by all means - sporting events of a popular nature, such as the GutsMuths Rennsteiglauf , which has been carried out since 1973, and the non-Olympic sports, however, hardly found support for sports management, whose main focus was on Olympic medals and world championship titles.
In football, FC Carl Zeiss Jena dominated Thuringia with the GDR championships in 1963, 1968 and 1970 and four victories in the FDGB Cup . The greatest success of the Jena is reaching the final in the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1981. In addition, Rot-Weiß Erfurt (champions 1954 and 1955), Wismut Gera , BSG Motor Altenburg , Motor Steinach , Motor Weimar and Motor Suhl played in the GDR -Uper league.
Thuringian sport in a united Germany
The collapse of the GDR in 1990 led to the restructuring of all sport on the basis of registered sports clubs. This was the prerequisite for the foundation of the Landessportbund Thüringen eV on September 29, 1990 in Bad Blankenburg . V. and the Thuringian Football Association on March 1, 1990, in whose area the newly formed Thuringian League has been the top division since 1990/91 .
Despite massive restructuring and economic problems, Thuringian athletes achieved international success. Above all, the speed skaters Gunda Niemann-Stirnemann , Sabine Völker , Daniela Anschütz-Thoms , the biathletes Sven Fischer , Daniel Graf , Frank Luck , Antje Misersky (first joint German Olympic champion), Simone Greiner-Petter-Memm , Kati Wilhelm should be mentioned , Katrin Apel and Andrea Henkel and the athlete Heike Drechsler and the marksman Ralf Schumann . At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City , the Thuringian athletes won 14 of the 35 German medals.
The Thuringian Forest and Oberhof in particular continued to develop into an internationally important winter sports region. In East Thuringia, the International Thuringia Tour of Women and the Köstritzer Throwing Day have established themselves as nationally known sporting events.
The top-class handball clubs in Thuringia are ThSV Eisenach (men) and Thuringia HC (women).
In volleyball, the women are particularly successful. The VfB 91 Suhl and black and white Erfurt include the volleyball league on. The Suhl women as a top team and the Erfurt women more as an elevator team .
There was a temporary change of power in football. FC Carl Zeiss Jena, which was dominant in GDR times, had to be relegated to the amateur league after a few years of membership in the 2nd Bundesliga , while the formerly less successful arch-rival FC Rot-Weiß Erfurt made it back to the 2nd division . In addition, the ZFC Meuselwitz was promoted to the regional football league . The most successful Thuringian soccer team is currently the women's team of FF USV Jena .
The GutsMuths Rennsteiglauf was able to further distinguish itself in the field of popular sports and regularly counts over 10,000 runners. Since 2011, found with the annual Glasbach race in Bad Liebenstein of runs European Hill Climb Championship in hill climbing instead.
Current Thuringian athletes and clubs
The following athletes were born in Thuringia or are currently active in Thuringian clubs:
Winter sports
Ronny Ackermann - Daniela Anschütz-Thoms - Jens Filbrich - Sebastian Haseney - Andrea Henkel - Stephan Hocke - Stefan Lindemann - Andreas Schlütter - Axel Teichmann - Alexander Wolf - David Möller - Andi Langenhan - Jan Eichhorn - Johannes Ludwig - Robert Eschrich - André Florschütz
Summer sports
Marco Engelhardt - Clemens Fritz - Sebastian Lang - Stephan Schreck - Ralf Schumann - René Wolff - Alexander Zickler - Thomas Ziegler - Anne Schäfer
Soccer
The women's team of FF USV Jena rose to the women's Bundesliga in 2008 and played first-class for several years.
In men's football, only a few football teams from Thuringia are represented in the top football leagues. In the 2020/21 season, the state is not represented in the top three leagues. The clubs FC Carl Zeiss Jena and ZFC Meuselwitz play in the fourth-class Regionalliga Nordost . FC Einheit Rudolstadt , FSV Martinroda , Wacker Nordhausen , FC An der Fahner Höhe , the former second division team , play in the southern season of the Oberliga Nordost (5th division), which is made up mostly of teams from Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt FC Rot-Weiß Erfurt and the second team of FC Carl Zeiss Jena.
basketball
With over 3,000 members organized in 63 clubs, basketball is one of the country's larger team sports (as of 2017). The clubs are organized in the Thuringian Basketball Association .
In the 2017/18 season , with Science City Jena and the Rockets , two Thuringian teams were represented in the basketball Bundesliga for the first time . Both clubs also competed with youth teams in the youth basketball league and the youth basketball league . After the relegation of the Rockets at the end of the season, the team withdrew from professional play. With the Basketball Löwen Erfurt , a new team in the ProB , the third highest division in basketball, was founded.
In wheelchair basketball , the RSB Thuringia Bulls, a Thuringian team, have been playing in the wheelchair basketball Bundesliga (RBBL) for several years . The club is one of the most successful German teams in recent years and won the triple of the German championship, DRS Cup and André Vergauwen Cup in 2016 and the double of the championship and IWBF Champions Cup in 2018 . Another Thuringian team, the Jena Caputs, played for several years in the RBBL and 2nd wheelchair basketball Bundesliga .
volleyball
The women's team at VfB 91 Suhl has been one of the top teams in the German Volleyball Bundesliga for years . Since the 16/17 season, the women of Schwarz-Weiß Erfurt have been playing in the first division again, to which they have already belonged several times in previous seasons.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Number of members in the sports offered. (PDF, 461 kB) (No longer available online.) Landessportbund Thuringia, March 15, 2017, archived from the original on August 13, 2017 ; accessed on August 13, 2017 . 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.
- ↑ NBBL group classification for the 2017/18 season . In: Junior & Youth Basketball Bundesliga - NBBL & JBBL . July 6, 2017 ( nbbl-basketball.de [accessed August 13, 2017]).
- ↑ JBBL group allocation for the 2017/18 season . In: Junior & Youth Basketball Bundesliga - NBBL & JBBL . July 10, 2017 ( nbbl-basketball.de [accessed on August 13, 2017]).
