by Willy Bietak (Austria) - He took part in the Olympic Games of Innsbruck(1964) and Grenoble (1968).
I began my career a little late. I was already ten years old. Until the age of 14. I practised individual figure skating and then my association asked me to practise figure skating in pairs. Together with my partner, Gerlinde Schonbauer, I took part in many international competitions of lower and higher level and we finally won the second place in the Austrian Championship Competitions in 1963. After this victory we were included among the Olympic athletes. Our training became more intensive, 3 hours daily, and we also started taking ballet lessons. We attended special courses with our team and we finally went to the famous German coach for figure skating in pairs, Erich Zeller.
This intensive training undoubtedly had a positive influence on our ice skating performance, but on the other hand our performance in school became positively mediocre to say the least. During the school year 1963-64 we had a total of approximately 600 hours of absence, a thing of which we were rather glad at the time.
The skating season 1963-64 was a wonderful time for us when you think of our age. My partner being 15 and me 16, we were the youngest couple among the competitors of the 1964 skating competitions in pairs.We won the 9th place at the European Championship in Grenoble. Though I made a fall, we succeeded in winning the 12th place of the Olympic Games at Innsbruck and the 11th place in the next World Championship in Dortmund.In 1965 too we had quite good results. We won the 10th place at the World Championship at Colorado Springs. But on the following year I made a fatal mistake. All my efforts were concentrated on winning a good place in the Olympic Games at Grenoble. But my ambitions were far from being purely athletic. I mainly wanted to become famous, as quickly as possible and you will understand my feelings better if you that I was training daily together with various ice skating champions such as Emmerich Danzer, many times European champion and world champion, Regine Heitzer, many times European champion and second world champion, and Wolfgang Schwartz, later Olympic champion, to mention only a few. I wished, at all cocts, to stop being outshone by all these great champions as was naturally the case at that time. Thinking that my partner was not the right oneI decided to change her. My new partner, Evelyn Schneider, was also a good, an excellent skater, but we were not suited to one another as to our style and height.
When we only won the 12th place in Vienna our disappointment was great but when we didn't succeed in going higher than the 15th place in the Olympic Games of Grenoble we felt so disappointed that we thought of abandoning ice skating.
But Oleg Protopopow from the Soviet Union, twice Olympic Champion, taught us a good leson. He made us see that in figure skating especially one should not compete merely for victory, but also for the joy feels when rendering music with figures. He explained this to me with a question: "Why do you dance?" he asked me (he knew that I simply adored dancing). I told him that I felt the urge to start dancing the moment I listened to good music. And then he said: "You see? That's exactly what I feel when ice skating. This is why ice skating has become one of the purposes of my life. Even today as an Olympic Champion I do not skate to win a medal, but mainly because I enjoy it." I thought over what Oleg had told me and I decided to follow his principle.