Waclaw Kuchar

Waclaw Kuchar

Wacław Michał Kuchar (born September 16, 1897 in Łańcut , Austria-Hungary , † February 13, 1981 in Warsaw ) was a Polish athlete who practiced numerous sports and u. a. won national championships in football , speed skating , ice hockey and athletics . He took part in the Olympic Games in 1924 and was voted the first athlete of the year in Poland in 1926.

Life

Youth and military service

Kuchar was born in 1897 and grew up in Łańcut in the Subcarpathian Mountains . At the age of 14, Kuchar was signed by the Polish football club Pogoń Lwów . He scored three goals in his first appearance. In its first season, the club reached a third place. When the First World War broke out in 1914 , Kuchar was drafted and served as a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army . He was also involved in the Polish-Ukrainian (1919) and Polish-Soviet war (1920) as a soldier in the Polish army . He returned highly decorated with numerous medals of honor and immediately began playing football again.

Career in football

By the end of his career in 1935, he was Polish football champion four times (1922, 1923, 1925, 1926) and twice top scorer (1922, 1926). According to unconfirmed sources, he scored 1,065 goals in 1,052 games for Pogoń Lwów. In the course of his career he played at times as a striker, as a midfielder and most recently as a defender. For the Polish national team he played 25 games in which he scored nine goals. He made his first appearance in 1921 against Hungary in the first ever Polish international match. In 1924 he took part in the Olympic Games in Paris with the Polish soccer team.

Success in other sports

Parallel to his footballing career, Kuchar also practiced other sports very successfully. As a track and field athlete , he became Polish champion in the 110-meter hurdles (1920), 800-meter run (1920, 1921), triple jump (1921), high jump (1921, 1923), 400-meter hurdles (1923) and decathlon (1923, 1924). In 1920 he was supposed to represent Poland as a track and field athlete at the Olympic Games , but due to the Polish-Soviet War Poland was forced to withdraw all athletes.

In speed skating , Kuchar won a total of 22 national championship titles between 1922 and 1929 and took part in the European championship in 1925 . He was also a player on the Pogoń Lwów ice hockey team . With this club he first won the runner-up championship in 1929 and 1930 and in 1933 he was also Polish champion in this discipline. He also won the silver medal at the 1929 European ice hockey championship with the Polish national team, for which he had nine missions . Other sports that he was actively involved in included a. Skiing , tennis and figure skating .

In 1926, Kuchar was voted the first athlete of the year in Poland .

Career after active sport

After the end of his active career, Kuchar first worked as a coach of Dynamo Lviv and later as a referee. After the Second World War he moved to Silesia and helped rebuild the Polonia Bytom club . From 1947 to 1949 he was the coach of the Polish national team. The greatest triumph of his tenure was a 3-1 win against arch rivals Czechoslovakia . Then he was also the coach of Legia Warsaw until 1953 . Later he also worked as a sports official.

Kuchar died in 1981 and was buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery .

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  Poland's national soccer team before the first international match in 1921, Kuchar second from left

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  Poland's Olympic team in 1924, Kuchar top third from the right

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  Pogoń Lwów ice hockey team (1930), Kuchar fifth from left

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  Kuchar's grave in Warsaw

Web links

Commons : Wacław Kuchar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Andreas Bock: The fantastic Mr. Kuchar biographical article on 11freunde.de from October 10, 2014
• Ryan Hubbard: The multi-talented Mr Kuchar Biography on IBWM September 24, 2012

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Olympic missions on fifa.com
2. ↑ Biography ( Memento of the original from October 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) 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. on carnivor.za.pl (Polish)