Guido Hegener: «short track speed skating is a really young sport in Germany»
Date: Lundi, avril 03 @ 11:31:00 PDT :: Topic: Athlete
 From Germany, Guido Hegener described us the situation of short track speed skating in his country. He explained us that the lack of success from Germany in that sport is probably due to the poor popularity and the insuffisant number of young skaters.
How did you have started speed skating?
I started skating with
the age of 5. My parents took me to some lakes in the Munich area, and after a few times I wanted
to go to a club’s practice because my parents couldn’t teach me
anymore. So I joined EHC
Klostersee Grafing in 1990, but as a figure skater. Finally, as figure skating actually
turned out to be too boring, I changed to the Short Track section around 1996. In 2004 I finished school
and became a professional sports soldier in the German army.
However I started to
notice that it wasn’t really my destination to be a professional
sportsman, as I rather missed some intellectual demands. I just felt like there
was something else than sports to be waiting for me. When it became clear that
I wouldn’t be a part of the Olympic team for Torino, I stopped skating in
March 2005 and was selected as a student at WHU Business
School. Sometimes I still take
part in some professional shows on ice, but that strongly depends on my time
schedule at the university.
Talk us about your club;
EHC Klostersee
Grafing, how does it works?
EHC Klostersee Grafing is mainly an
ice-hockey club. There is also
a figure skating and a short track section. The ice rink is rather
old and the ice quality is not the best, but nevertheless there has been a
quite considerable amount of excellent skaters from this club, like for example
Susanne Rudolph.
Renate Feichtner is the short
track head coach, and the short distance to Munich’s training facilities allows the
skaters to practice also there. Actually I am not quite
sure if the club will be able to maintain the ice rink, as the hockey team has enormous
financial problems at the moment.
Can you talk us about the situation of short track speed
skating in Germany? Germany has been dominant in Torino games for many
sports, whats the situation of short track among all the other sports?
Well, its right that Germany won the most medals in Torino,
but if you take a closer look at the kind of sports we are successful in, you
will find out that almost all of them are “classical” Olympic sports
and bring years and years of tradition with them. Short Track speed skating is a really young
sport in Germany.
It came up in the late 80s, and then developed further on when Eastern Germany was reintegrated. It took a lot of time
until we had a certain level of expertise and coaching skills, as there was no
real pattern to orientate at, and long track skating techniques are far too
different to ours.
In the recent years there
have been at least some successes of German skaters, but our main problem at
the moment is that there are just too few young skaters. You have to see that the
popularity of short track in Germany
is very low, so people rather like to play soccer or tennis and don’t
even know that something like short track even exists. Nevertheless I am
convinced that in maybe another ten years Germany will make it to be one of the
top short track nations, presumed that there will be enough young athletes to
be trained.
Photo: Guido Hegener, at the 1st German National Cup 2000/2001 in
Oberstdorf (21./22.10.2000)
Credit: http://shorttrack.net
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