Ulrich Salchow

Ulrich Salchow
Full name	Karl Emil Julius Ulrich Salchow
nation	Sweden
birthday	August 7, 1877
place of birth	Copenhagen, Denmark
date of death	April 18, 1949
Place of death	Stockholm, Sweden
Career
discipline	Single run
Medal table
Olympic medals 1 × 0 × 0 × World Cup medals 10 × 3 × 0 × EM medals 9 × 0 × 1 ×
Olympic games gold London 1908 Men's  World figure skating championships silver Stockholm 1897 Men's silver Davos 1899 Men's silver Davos 1900 Men's gold Stockholm 1901 Men's gold London 1902 Men's gold Saint Petersburg 1903 Men's gold Berlin 1904 Men's gold Stockholm 1905 Men's gold Vienna 1907 Men's gold Troppau 1908 Men's gold Stockholm 1909 Men's gold Davos 1910 Men's gold Berlin 1911 Men's  European figure skating championships gold Trondheim 1898 Men's gold Davos 1899 Men's gold Berlin 1900 Men's bronze Vienna 1901 Men's gold Davos 1904 Men's gold Davos 1906 Men's gold Berlin 1907 Men's gold Budapest 1909 Men's gold Berlin 1910 Men's gold Oslo 1913 Men's

Karl Emil Julius Ulrich Salchow (born August 7, 1877 in Copenhagen , † April 18, 1949 in Stockholm ) was a Swedish figure skater who started in a single run . With ten world championship titles and nine European championship titles , he is the most successful figure skater at these tournaments. He is also the Olympic champion of 1908 and namesake of the Salchow jump , one of the six basic jumps in figure skating .

Career

As an active athlete

Ulrich Salchow was the son of a regimental paymaster, the father's family originally came from Bohemia . The family lived in Østerbro , his younger brother was the later writer Wilhelm Salchow . The mother was a figure skater and was called an ice princess . The son Ulrich also started skating at the age of eight. In 1891 the family moved to Stockholm , where Salchow became a member of the General Skating Club (SASK). He made his debut in a school competition in February: coffee was strictly forbidden to the children in the Salchow family, but the son convinced the father that he would win if he had coffee beforehand. Ulrich Salchow took victory with a pair of old ice skates. He developed "a passion", as he later said himself, for figure skating and was supervised by the master runner Ivar Hult . He trained on his club's ice rink or on the frozen Nybroviken Bay.

In 1895 the first Swedish championship in figure skating was held, Salchow was runner-up, and the following year he won the title. Thereupon he was nominated together with the runner-up Thiolf Borg for the world championship taking place the following weekend in Stockholm, where Salchow took second place behind the Austrian Gustav Hügel . At the European Championship three weeks later, World Champion Hügel did not compete, and Salchow won against two Norwegians, even though all five judges were Norwegians. Thereupon Salchow declared that he would never again compete in a national championship: “Anyone who has won an international championship once, concentrates on the next!” He was European champion nine times in the course of his career (1898–1900, 1904, 1906–1907, 1909–1910) , 1913).

In 1901 Salchow, whose strength was the compulsory program, won his first of a total of ten World Cup titles in front of thousands of spectators at Nybroviken in Stockholm. At the World Cup in 1902 he won before the runner-up, the British Madge Syers . The following year, the participation of women in the men's competitions was banned, which had not been explicitly the case until then; from 1906 a separate world championship for women was organized. In 1903 Salchow became world champion in Saint Petersburg , and the Tsar gave him a 60 kilogram silver copy of the enormous equestrian statue of Peter the Great . Salchow had problems getting them through customs and the gift cost him dearly. At the 1906 World Cup in Munich , Salchow did not compete because he feared that the judges would not be treated fairly there, as his greatest competitor was the German Gilbert Fuchs . In 1910 and 1911 he relegated the German Werner Rittberger to second place at world championships .

Salchow became the first Olympic champion in figure skating: at the Summer Games in London in 1908 he won the gold medal; There were independent winter games only from 1924. In 1911 he resigned from active sport, but had two comebacks in 1913 and 1920 - at the age of 42 - whereby he failed his own jump when he started at the Olympic Games in 1920 and therefore only came fourth. Salchow also took part in national competitions in other sports, such as bobsleigh , sailing and cycling . He was also internationally active in cycling.

Ulrich Salchow is known to this day for the Salchow jump, which he invented and named after him and which he developed during his preparations for the 1910 World Cup in Davos . The jump is now often performed four times in men's figure skating competitions, and very rarely in women.

Personal and professional

Ulrich Salchow was an amateur athlete . At 21, he made his career in the electrical industry independently, and later served as General Agent of Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. operates. He constructed a figure skate that was marketed under his name and wrote a manual for figure skating (1906) that was published in four languages. In 1904 he became a sports journalist at Dagens Nyheter under the pseudonym Ten and later a member of the Swedish Writers' Club.

At 50, Salchow was still a bachelor. Then he met the Danish doctor Anna Gormsen, who was married and the mother of three daughters. The couple married in 1931.

Salchow held numerous positions as a functionary: from 1925 to 1937 he was President of the International Skating Union (ISU). He was the founder and for many years a leading official of the Swedish Ice Skating Federation, secretary of the Swedish Cycling Federation, an official in automobile races , a member of the board of the National Sports Federation , an official of the athletics competitions at the 1912 Olympic Games and chairman of the Swedish Boxing Federation (1919-32).

After Salchow had been president of the ISU for twelve years, an opposing candidate, the Dutchman Gerrit van Laer , was elected as the new president in 1937 . Salchow attacked the new president on behalf of the Swedish Skating Association, which led to disputes within the association, whereupon Salchow left this. In April 1939 he gave the sports directors of the leading Stockholm newspapers a report that culminated in attacks against van Laer and members of the Swedish Skating Association. He was then banned from any functionary activity for three years by the Swedish umbrella sports association.

Ulrich Salchow collapsed and was admitted to the Beckomberga mental hospital. He died in Stockholm in 1949 at the age of 71 and was buried on Norra begravningsplatsen in Solna , Stockholm County . His wife died in 1998 at the age of 104 and is buried in the same grave.

Honors

In 1976 Salchow was inducted into the Figure Skating Hall of Fame .

Results

Competition / year	1895	1896	1897	1898	1899	1900	1901	1902	1903	1904	1905	1906	1907	1908	1909	1910	1911	1913	1920
Olympic games														1.					4th
World championships			2.		2.	2.	1.	1.	1.	1.	1.		1.	1.	1.	1.	1.
European championships				1.	1.	1.	3.			1.		1.	1.		1.	1.		1.
Swedish championships	1.	1.	1.

Fonts

• Art skating on the ice . Grethlein, Leipzig 1910.

literature

• Ake Jönsson: Salchow lives in his jump . In: Contributions to the history of sports . No. 17 . Berlin 2003, p. 38-42 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ulrich Salchow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ulrich Salchow in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Ulrich Salchow (1911) on YouTube , May 5, 2009

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Salchow. In: runeberg.org. Retrieved May 14, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 38.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 39.
4. ↑ Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 39/40.
5. ↑ Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 40.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 41.
7. ↑ January Lindroth: KEJ Ulrich Salchow . In: Svenskt biografiskt lexikon . tape 31 , 2000, pp. 282 (Swedish, Ulrich Salchow ).
8. ↑ Jönsson, Salchow lives in his jump , p. 42.
9. ↑ knerger.de: Ulrich Salchow's grave
10. ^ Dr Anna Elizabeth Bahnson Salchow (1894-1998). In: findagrave.com. Retrieved May 12, 2018 .