Gymnastics Federation Wolfurt
The Turnerschaft Wolfurt is guided on a voluntary basis sports club with a focus on gymnastics , teamgym , Austrian width Turn program Turn10 and fitness and health. A total of 730 members (including 320 children) belonged to the association in 2018.
TS Wolfurt is of national importance as a multiple national champion in team gymnastics, organizer of national and international gymnastics competitions and as an important club in popular sport with five World Gymnaestrada participations. TS Wolfurt is one of the most successful clubs in the Vorarlberg Gymnastics Association in the field of young talent . The biggest event in the club's history was the World Gymnaestrada 2007 , at which Wolfurt acted both as the host for 660 athletes from Norway and as the venue. Within the market town of Wolfurt, the gymnastics association is particularly important as a youth sponsor and fitness provider for adults of all ages.
Training facility
Since 2018, the Sport-Mittelschule Wolfurt has had a newly built gymnastics hall, which is one of the most modern training facilities of its kind in Austria. The hall is used for teaching at the secondary school and is available to the Wolfurt gymnastics club outside of school hours. For team gymnastics, the tumbling track offers a height-adjustable landing zone based on the Norwegian model. The classic gymnastics equipment horse, rings, vaulting table, parallel bars, horizontal bars, uneven bars and bars are each set up multiple times and supplemented with various special equipment for learning the elements. Two giant trampolines enable high-quality technique training, and a trampoline track that is gentle on the joints. The center of the hall is the floor exercise area, which can be separated from the equipment area by means of a partition. A boulder wall is attached to the edge of the floor area. On the upper floor, the hall offers an additional large gymnastics room. The new hall is intended exclusively for training and not for events - these will be held in the adjacent Hofsteigsporthalle.
Gymnastics in Wolfurt before 1946
TS Wolfurt has existed in its current constellation since 1946, but the origins of gymnastics in Wolfurt go back to 1886. At that time the German-liberal "Gymnastics Club" Wolfurt was founded, which had a political as well as sporting orientation. The second important political force of the time also founded a sports club: In 1909 a Christian -social-oriented gymnastics section was formed in the Catholic workers' association, and in 1919 the Catholic "Gymnastics Association" was formed. After the First World War , the gymnastics club stopped operating due to a lack of staff and competition from the more successful gymnastics association.
Thus, after the First World War, the Christian Social Gymnastics Association was the only provider in the sporting leisure sector in Wolfurt. The offer of the Gymnastics Association included both classic apparatus gymnastics and athletics , but disciplines such as skiing , wrestling and dancing were also practiced. The gymnastics association was thus a pool for various sports. After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, the Wolfurt Gymnastics Association was dissolved on the instructions of the National Socialists; The Christian social orientation of the association was a thorn in their side, and any sport in the sense of the Nazi regime should only be practiced in the Hitler Youth .
From the former gymnastics union, the gymnastics club emerged in 1946 as the only gymnastics club in the community. The club name "-schaft" was introduced to avoid the politically proven names "Turnverein" and "Turnerbund". The founders of the new association had learned from the negative effects of political influence before the Second World War . Since then, the gymnastics community has only had sporting goals and no political orientation.
History of TS Wolfurt
The first gymnastics lessons of the gymnastics club in 1886 took place in two classes in the old school house. Mention is also made of an empty embroidery room that was used for training before 1913. From 1913 to 1921 the small hall of the Wolfurt club house was available for training for the gymnastics association, and from 1932 gymnastics was also carried out on the meadow next to the Strohdorf schoolhouse.
When the Wolfurt gymnastics club was founded in 1946 after the end of the Second World War, the club house continued to serve as a training facility. The floor exercises were done on the hard wooden floor, in winter it was bitterly cold, you could do gymnastics around the club house stove, which you heated yourself.
In 1964, the Wolfurt community built a gym in the area of the secondary school. It was heated all year round and equipped with new mats. The good training conditions meant that the first Vorarlberg gymnastics center was located in Wolfurt. The best gymnasts in Vorarlberg came to Wolfurt, where they trained in the new hall under the direction of four-time Olympic participant and 43-time Austrian state champion Hans Sauter . A series of national successes made the community of Wolfurt known throughout Austria as a gymnastics center.
After the first construction phase of the state sports school (today: state sports center) was completed in Dornbirn in 1970 , the training of the state squad took place in Dornbirn and no longer in Wolfurt. Since then, TS Wolfurt has focused on promoting young talent and sends a selection to the state sports center, where training with professional equipment and professional trainers takes place.
In 1984, after only 20 years of existence, the gym was demolished and replaced by the large Hofsteig sports hall with a grandstand and three departments. The gymnastics club moved. She trained in a small main school gym from 1984 to 2018; the Hofsteigsporthalle is still used for competitions today. While in 1984 15 team leaders and 280 members belonged to TS Wolfurt, the number of gymnasts in Wolfurt had almost doubled by 2008: 44 coaches and 450 members belonged to the club in 2008. This resulted in a lack of space, which was responded to by moving some training groups to the halls of the Bütze and Mähdle elementary schools.
By 2017 the association had grown to 670 members. After the Wolfurt Middle School received a new gymnasium in 2018, the club's space problem was also resolved. The new gym is available to the Wolfurt gymnastics club outside of school hours.
Events
TS Wolfurt made a name for itself nationally and internationally by organizing important competitions such as international competitions and exhibition gymnastics with Hungary, the 1990 European Junior Cup final with the best four nations in the world, the Head Cup for artistic gymnastics, national and state championships of the four-country struggle in 2004 between Belarus, Romania, Switzerland and Austria.
The highlight in the history of TS Wolfurt was the World Gymnaestrada 2007 , which took place in eight Vorarlberg municipalities and cities in addition to the central event location in the Dornbirn exhibition center. An outside stage was located in a marquee on Wolfurter Weberstrasse. A total of 60 acclaimed gymnastics shows for around 1,000 athletes from 16 nations were presented in Wolfurt.
Gymnastics
Some Wolfurt gymnasts reached the top of Austrian gymnastics. Various assignments at major international events can also be found in the balance sheet, each of which was placed in the middle of the field.
The most successful athletes of TS Wolfurt in artistic gymnastics are:
- Johann König (24-time national champion, Olympic participant in Rome 1960, one World Cup and five European Championship participations)
- Egon Waibel (four-time national champion, Olympic participant in Rome 1960, two World Cup participations)
- Heidrun König (3-time national champion, one World Cup and one European Championship participation)
- Ilonka König (one-time national champion, one World Cup participation)
- Claudia Herburger (3-time national champion, one European Championship participation)
- Sibylle Meusburger (7-time national champion, one World Cup and one European Championship participation)
- Mathias Mohr ( pommel horse - vice state champion, pommel horse ÖM third)
- Lukas Wüstner (4-time team state champion, horizontal bar vice -state champion, 3 × ÖM third, two European championships)
- Florian Braitsch ( EYOF participant 2013, 2-time team national champion, World Cup participant 2014, 5-time vice national champion)
- Fabio Sereinig ( EYOF participant 2015, two-time team national champion, Austrian youth champion 2014 on the horizontal bar)
Team gymnastics
In the second half of the 20th century, club gymnastics (section gymnastics) based on the Swiss model was practiced in Wolfurt. Sectional gymnastics is a sport known exclusively in Switzerland and the state of Vorarlberg, in which teams work on several gymnastic equipment such as B. parallel bars or mini trampolines. In section gymnastics, TS Wolfurt was multiple Vorarlberg champions from the 1970s to the 2000s .
Team gymnastics from Scandinavia has been in the foreground at TS Wolfurt since 2001, and this sport was re-introduced throughout Austria in the same year. TS Wolfurt won the state championship in the master class in 2014, 2015 and 2016 .
Until 2014, the Austrian Gymnastics Association sent club teams to the European Championships in team gymnastics. From 2016 national teams (always including team gymnasts from TS Wolfurt) will be nominated.
| Year, venue | EM placement | category |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 Ghent | Rank 13 | TS Wolfurt, mixed |
| 2014 Reykjavik | Rank 5 | TS Wolfurt, gentlemen |
| 2016 Maribor | Rank 5 | National team, gentlemen |
| Year, venue | State champion title , team gymnastics | category |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 Kirchdorf | Rank 1 | TS Wolfurt, gentlemen |
| 2015 Schwanenstadt | Rank 1 | TS Wolfurt, gentlemen |
| 2016 Dornbirn | Rank 1 | TS Wolfurt, gentlemen |
Statistics, Gymnaestrada
The Wolfurt Gymnastics Association had participated in the Gymnaestrada width gymnastics festival five times up to 2018 . In 1999 TS Wolfurt was Vorarlberg's first (and in Gothenburg only) club with a Gymnaestrada participation. Before that, Vorarlberg was only represented with national selections and not with club groups. The TS Wolfurt show presentation in Lisbon was rated as the best Austrian performance by the Austrian Trade Association (ÖFT). At the 1st Gym for Life Challenge held in the Dornbirn exhibition center in 2009 , TS Wolfurt was awarded the second highest category, "Silver". In popular sport there was not only the Gymnaestrada but also several participations in the International German Gymnastics Festival.
| Year, venue | equipment | theme |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 Gothenburg | Parallel bars, horizontal bar, horse, floor | Device combination |
| 2003 Lisbon | Parallel bars, trampoline | Titanic parody |
| 2007 Dornbirn / Wolfurt | Parallel bars, mini trampoline | Clown acrobatics |
| 2011 Lausanne | Parallel bars, floor, mini trampoline | Knight of the Apocalypse |
| 2015 Helsinki | Airtrack, parallel bars, mini trampoline | Gym robots |
Web links
- Homepage of the Vorarlberg Association for Gymnastics (VTS)
- Homepage of the Austrian Association for Gymnastics (ÖFT)
- Pictures of the Gymnaestrada in Wolfurt
- Association newspaper of the Vorarlberger Turnerschaft , online as a pdf.