Walter Steffens (gymnast)

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Walter Steffens (Turner)
medal table

Apparatus gymnast

German Reich NSGerman Reich (Nazi era) German Empire
Olympic Summer Games
gold 1936 Team all-around
World championships
bronze 1934 Team all-around

Walter Johan Heinrich Steffens (born December 26, 1908 in Rehden ; † August 23, 2006 Barnstorf) was a German gymnast and Olympic champion.

Life

Gymnastics career

Walter Steffens was one of the world's best pommel horse gymnasts in the 1930s. In 1934 he won the bronze medal in the team all-round at the World Gymnastics Championships in Budapest.

On August 18, 1935 he won the Olympic elimination gymnastics of the Gaugruppe Nord in Stettin . He also took part in the gymnastics Reichsheer-Deutsche Turnerschaft in 1935 for the German Gymnastics Association .

The son from a family of craftsmen was at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, together with Alfred Schwarzmann and other Olympic champions in the all- around competition with the German team.

From September 1, 1936, Steffens worked as a gymnastics teacher for the Hamburg gymnastics association from 1816, and in this role he strengthened the Hamburg gymnasts . In addition, he now took part in the city ​​battles Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig . On October 25, 1936, he immediately became the best individual gymnast at the 32nd city battle in the Leipzig Krystallpalast . In the overall ranking he won in Leipzig. In the same year, on December 6th, Steffens took part with the Nordmark team in the Apollo Theater in Düsseldorf in the jugglery match against the Lower Rhine and won the individual ranking.

In 1938 Steffens became German champion on bars.

In the freestyle test of the master class in Verden an der Aller, he was gymnastics for Lüdenscheid on October 26, 1948, second behind Jakob Kiefer , who won the Grand Prix of the city of Verden.

In August 1949 he showed his world class once again in the Olympic team of 1936 at an exhibition gymnastics in Goslar together with Stadel, Stangl, Schwarzmann and Frey.

In 1950 he retired from competitive sports.

After the Second World War, Walter Steffens was a physical education teacher at the Hamm grammar school, the Freiherr vom Stein secondary school in Bergkamen and the Schalke grammar school in Gelsenkirchen .

classification

During his career, the enthusiastic gymnast was somewhat overshadowed by the three-time Olympic and all-round winner of Berlin, Alfred Schwarzmann , but in the 1930s he was considered one of the best pommel horse artists in the world. As the gymnastics veteran later confessed, elegance and technical perfection were always more important to him than the performance of unstable maximum difficulties. «I wasn't a daredevil type. In Berlin in 1936 I managed almost everything, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the jump, ”he said.

In 1949 the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote about his strengths:

" (...) Most difficult device, as always, horse since. A treacherous invention, the sight of which reminds one involuntarily of Walter Steffens, the Olympic champion, whose mastery of this device was not only a visual pleasure for tens of thousands. (...) "

In 1956, the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote about his 1936 Olympic preparations:

“ (...) just like Walter Steffens from Hamburg used to work for the 1936 Olympic Games. He fetched the pommel horse at night and did gymnastics in the dark. (...) "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hamburger Anzeiger, October 26, 1936.
  2. ↑ Hamburger Anzeiger, December 7, 1936.
  3. ↑ The archive: reference work for politics, economy, culture, volumes 46-48, 1938.
  4. ^ Kiefer before Steffens in: Hamburger Abendblatt of October 27, 1948
  5. ↑ Sports Sunday in brief in: Hamburger Abendblatt of August 8, 1949
  6. ↑ The Turner again olympia mature in: Hamburger Abendblatt on April 24, 1950
  7. ↑ Frank Thomas: Berlin was enthusiastic about his swings, in: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of August 25, 2006.
  8. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt of April 16, 1949. Online
  9. ^ Hamburger Abendblatt of July 25, 1956. Online
personal data
SURNAME Steffens, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steffens, Walter Johan Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German gymnast, Olympic champion (1936)
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Barnstorf
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 2006
Place of death Barnstorf