If you want to be among the best in Austria, you have to endure something. Kleschpis knew what he was talking about. As a trauma surgeon and in his specialty, knee and shoulder surgery, the senior physician at the Kepler Clinic in Linz was one of the top specialists in the country. Kleschpis was easy to deal with. He was straight to the point with his diagnoses. With him you knew immediately where you stood in every respect. Exactly the kind of speech that athletes in particular need.
His contribution to the Linz Black Wings’ two championship titles (2003 and 2012) was enormous. Again and again he managed to get players fit who had expected weeks of breaks themselves. And because the surgical calendar was always so full, there was actually no time when Kleschpis wasn’t available for athletes’ problems.
He looked after the ice hockey cracks for decades as well as the handball players of HC Linz. Kleschpis played there himself as a teenager, before he moved to Graz to study medicine and was also active in the handball state league team HC Graz. He didn’t take it easy on himself there, just as he did later on with his second great passion for sport, mountain biking. “My partner is a doctor herself, she understands that,” Kleschpis once said in an OÖN interview about how commitment at work and at top clubs can be reconciled with private life. The father of three sons was always particularly pleased about the father-son rounds of golf together.
The fact that Kleschpis unexpectedly didn’t wake up yesterday at the age of 61 leaves not only Upper Austria’s sports scene speechless. We spare ourselves any further comment about the sadness, which is great – every word would have been one too many for him.
Source: Nachrichten
