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World champion trainer Vlado Stenzel turns 87: The »magician« who saved handball

2021-07-23T16:40:21.464Z


World Champion '78: Vlado Stenzel celebrated a handball miracle with the German national team. The trainer achieved the really big hit with apparently quirky ideas. Today he turns 87 - a phone call in Dalmatia.


Hardly anyone has shaped an Olympic team sport like Vlado Stenzel.

As a young coach in Munich in 1972, he first led Yugoslavia, the motherland of indoor handball, to an Olympic victory.

And six years later the Federal Republic on the "miracle of Copenhagen":

20:19 against the Soviet Union in the World Cup final, a sensation

.

On Friday, Stenzel, nicknamed "Magician", will be 87 years old.

SPIEGEL:

Hello Mr. Stenzel, we congratulate you!

How are you?

Stenzel:

Thank you, very good.

The Adriatic is beautiful.

After 47 years in Germany, three years ago I moved to Dalmatia, near Šibenik.

The air, the sea - I love this landscape.

SPIEGEL:

When did you know that you could become a good coach?

Enlarge image

Vulkan on the sidelines: Stenzel was always good for spontaneous flashes of anger

Photo: Sven Simon / imago images

Stenzel:

Oh my goodness, big question.

Even when I was in the military, I felt my talent as a coach when I led a team in which no one had ever held a ball before to third place in the championship.

When I was 27, I became the coach of Medveszak Zagreb.

At that time I wanted to reinvent handball - and I wanted revenge.

SPIEGEL:

Why revenge?

Stenzel:

The team I was goalkeeper in was sometimes cheated by referees.

It was easy because during this time three referees whistled from the home clubs.

So my first goal was to make my team so strong that no referee could whistle any more.

SPIEGEL:

And did you do that straight away?

Stenzel:

Very quickly. But I was lucky too. Because I played the first international match for Yugoslavia as a goalkeeper, I was able to study sports in Zagreb. My motto has always been: learn from the best coaches, also from other sports. For example, I have dealt a lot with defensive behavior in volleyball, the block game. I took over the sociograms that I created for my team from a sports psychologist.

The Zagreb club rose under Stenzel, became champions twice and made it to the final of the European Cup in 1965.

Two years later he became the national coach of Yugoslavia and created

a legendary, almost unbeatable team

up to the

1972 Olympic Games

in Munich.

In order to combat the hubris of his stars, Stenzel sometimes ordered tournaments to play permanently outnumbered or with unusual cover variants.

And provoked such established trainers as GDR coach Heinz Seiler.

SPIEGEL:

What was your engine as the national coach?

Stenzel:

My main motive was to show the communist nations that their methods were not superior.

Countries like Romania, the CSSR and the GDR had won everything for years, the Soviet Union and Poland also made strong gains.

All of these teams were barracked for months in preparation for the tournament and had a stereotyped, mechanical style.

I had something else in mind.

I oriented myself more towards American basketball and wanted to develop handball as an art form, as a playful ease.

We let this style play in the clubs.

SPIEGEL:

That sounds simple ...

Stenzel:

... but it wasn't.

The art of handball has to be trained a lot.

We have drawn all of the players from the youth through years of individual work, many of which were later absolutely world-class.

I recently counted that: In my career I have brought around 100 handball players from youth to world class, in Germany for example Erhard Wunderlich or Arnulf Meffle.

SPIEGEL:

Why did you stay in Germany after the 1972 Olympics?

Stenzel:

My grandfather was German, I went to a German school in Zagreb, so I knew the language. In addition, Ivan Snoj, the most important functionary in Yugoslav handball, pressed me downright: “Vlado, if you don't go to Germany and make handball big there, the whole sport will break. Then there will never be real indoor handball in western Europe. "

Stenzel accepted an offer from Phönix Essen and waited.

Because the German Handball Federation, long arrested in field handball, initially continued to rely on German coaches.

When the Federal Republic failed miserably in the preliminary round at the 1974 World Cup, Stenzel's chance came.

He sorted out old stars like Hansi Schmidt and built a young team around talents like Joachim Deckarm,

Heiner Brand

and Kurt Klühspies.

On March 6, 1976, a spectacular surprise succeeded against the GDR in Karl-Marx-Stadt: the qualification for the Olympics in Montreal.

Manfred Hofmann held the decisive seven meter in the final second - and millions saw it live on the ARD “Sportschau”.

SPIEGEL:

You once called this Olympic ticket your greatest success.

Stenzel:

I still see it that way.

Because it was there that the West, in which there was hardly any training, conquered the East for the first time.

A turning point, nobody believed in it before.

This victory brought a whole movement against the communist Eastern bloc, which totally stank to me.

Believe me: only then did nations like France and Spain, which are strong today, really get going.

SPIEGEL:

Would you have become world champion two years later without the key experience in Karl-Marx-Stadt?

Stenzel:

It's hard to say. In any case, the self-confidence that people like Brand, Klühspies, Ehret or Deckarm drew from it was enormous. Today I know: that was the most precise work I have ever done. In addition to the DHB selection, I also trained the juniors. Without the talents of the Junior World Championships in 1977, people like Freisler, Wunderlich, Meffle or Niemeyer, we would never have become world champions in 1978. I think it's horrific that this is no longer done today: the national coach has so much time, he can also train the juniors, at least every now and then. That will motivate them tremendously.

SPIEGEL:

At the World Cup in Denmark you took an unconventional approach and did not let the players train properly the day before the final, but sent them to the swimming pool.

And in the evening everyone was allowed to have one or two beers in their room.

Stenzel:

What else should you train there?

We knew we could beat the Russians even if they were Olympic champions.

It was more important to me that the players got a good night's sleep.

The German handball players played like there was no tomorrow: an epic final, three goals in a row by

Jimmy Waltke

, who

was substituted in and then replaced

, drama right up to the final whistle - and the team was world champion out of nowhere. Handball heroes. After the title, Stenzel was lifted to the sky in such a way that he lost his grip on the ground. The coach took care of his advertising contracts and neglected his team. And then this damned accident happened on March 31, 1979: Jo Deckarm, perhaps the best handball player in the world,

fell on the concrete floor in Tatabanya and fell into a coma for 131 days

.

The world championship team was finally blown up when

Brand, Klühspies and Hofmann resigned

after

the Olympic boycott in 1980

.

At the home World Cup in 1982, the host only reached seventh place - and Stenzel was fired.

Its greatest days were over.

He still celebrated successes with VfL Bad Schwartau (promotion to the Bundesliga) and TSV Milbertshofen (cup victory), then went over the villages and crashed financially.

Enlarge image

Trainer Stenzel: Always connected to handball

Photo: Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert / picture alliance / dpa

SPIEGEL:

Have you ever regretted not being more humble after winning the World Cup?

Stenzel:

You know, such a situation is not easy.

If one is carried through all the halls, then one cannot run in the forest.

Today I do a forest run every day, morning and evening

(laughs)

.

SPIEGEL:

Are you still in contact with the 1978 world champions?

Stenzel:

Yes!

They were here two years ago, Kurt Klühspies and Heiner Brand for example, for my 85th birthday.

In three years, when I turn 90, I will invite them back.

Then you are welcome to come.

It's really nice here.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-07-23

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