“Tabula rasa” in athletics

After 23 years as a national athletics coach, Wolfgang Adler moved to Switzerland this month, where he will now work as an athletics coach for Swiss Sliding (Association for Tobogganing, Bobsleigh and Skeleton). Even if Upper Austria’s figureheads Verena Mayr, Susanne Gogl-Walli and Matthias Lasch are still working with him at least until the summer games, Upper Austria’s athletics needs a replacement. “We saw this as an opportunity to restructure things, to make tabula rasa,” said state President Roland Werthner, presenting a new concept on Monday.

After that, there will no longer be one national coach, as Adler was, but the work will be distributed among eight coaches who will offer the Upper Austrian talents support that is as coordinated in terms of time and location as possible. Eight young, well-trained coaches with athletics experience were recruited: Stanislav Vala, Rose Koppitsch, Niki Franzmair, Martina Bruneder-Winter, Philipp Kronsteiner, Laurenz Kirchmayr, Andreas Prem and Richard Marschall, who returned from Salzburg. According to Gerhard Zallinger, diversification is the central point of the new concept. Because of the different requirements of the different disciplines, the vice president continued, it is practically impossible for just one person to cover this: “There is no longer a single national coach.”

Translated into athletics, this means, according to the sports scientist who also works for the ÖFB team: “Now we no longer have one track, but eight.”

It is obvious that one full-time employee cannot be increased to eight in one fell swoop. Vala is employed while individual solutions are developed with the others. According to the two association board members, it helps that funds for the trainers can also be drawn from the competence center set up by the state in Linz. This makes perfect sense, in the past the former junior heptathlon world champion Sarah Lagger had chosen the southern part of the city over Linz as her training base, among other things because of the more promising support situation.

In addition, the association wants to find a coach for its own world-class athletes. Since Gogl-Walli and Mayr are still working with Adler for the time being, they have at least until Paris.