Triple Gold Medal Winner Manfred Kohl Goes for a Fourth at the Sydney Paralympics
Inside story
SYDNEY — Travis Cranley always savoured the moment when an opponent first noticed Manfred Kohl’s orthesis. The device, fitting over Kohl’s left leg at the thigh and extending to an artificial foot that compensated for his short leg, made him an inviting target on a national-champion volleyball team.
‘That is usually good news for me, because it means they might try to serve him for a few points,’ Cranley, the team’s setter and a former player for Australia, mused back when they were playing side by side. ‘Once he has passed a few perfectly, they usually rethink their strategy of targeting ‘the guy with the funny leg’.’
Until then, Kohl seemed a weak link amid forbidding team-mates who had played as many as 200 or more games for Australia. However, the Kohl that opponents did not see was a German Paralympian who, like Olympic legend Karch Kiraly, is bidding to become the first four-time gold medallist in volleyball at the Sydney 2000 Games.
Kiraly switched from indoor volleyball to beach volleyball at Atlanta in 1996 and became the first Olympian to win three gold medals in volleyball. Kohl and Karl-Josef Weissenfels became the only Paralympians with three when Germany won its third straight standing-volleyball title at Atlanta. Weissenfels will not try for four, but an invitation from Germany to his new home in Australia convinced Kohl to go for it at age 39.
The record is not the driving force, though, for the man who was managing the classification of Paralympic athletes for the Sydney Games when the call for help came.
‘It’s more the excitement of being an athlete in these Games,’ he said before leaving recently to train in Germany. ‘Having had the honour to be on the other side and see the preparations, I’m pretty sure this will be really the pinnacle of disabled sports so far in Paralympic history.
‘I don’t want to miss this last chance,’ he said. ‘And, in a way, I’m also honouring the request from Germany that they are still confident enough to say, ‘Hey, we want Manfred to play with us.”
In a sense, Kohl is getting bonus time on the back end of his career, making up for what he lost at the front end. Born with no fibula in his left leg, he had tried to join a volleyball league with his friends at age 14, when the defect ended his soccer days but remained only mildly apparent. Their club decided against joining, unsure he could keep up as the sixth player.
Fortunately, the coach suggested they keep training. For more than a year, they did. In tournaments, they often beat the league teams. More importantly, though, the endless training ironically developed the skills that Kohl would turn into a Paralympic career.
His big break came in 1984. Kohl stumbled upon an article in a German volleyball magazine about the Paralympic team’s dramatic loss to Israel at the Games in New York. He did not even know such a team existed, but the coach’s name and contact number were listed.
Kohl made contact and agreed to a tryout at the sports university in Cologne.
‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ he said. ‘I had not the slightest idea — yeah, OK, national volleyball team for disabled, but what kind of disabilities do they have? Can they really play? Can they jump? I was thinking, ‘Do they really understand volleyball?’
‘I had a little bit the idea there was some social activity they were doing there, something nice for the disabled,’ he said. ‘But after the first training, I was very, very impressed. I was really tired after three days of training.’
What Kohl found was a point system that operated like many other Paralympic sports, gauging the players’ disabilities. On standing volleyball’s scale of 1 to 8, Kohl became a 4 with his leg that now measures 16 to 17 centimetres (about 6½ inches) shorter than his right leg.
A team must keep at least one C player (6, 7 or 8 points) on the floor and no more than one A player (1 or 2 points). Most, like Kohl, are B players (3, 4 or 5 points). A key to a strong team is a solid C player, but the hardest spot to fill often is the A player. The disability may be simply a slightly shorter leg that disrupts the walking rhythm, and many of those candidates hesitate to identify themselves as disabled.
What Kohl also found, besides the disabled point system, was a coach who felt his players still should compete against able-bodied teams as a way of life, reverting only when the national team convened to train for major events. Germany adopted the principle from Israel, which had dominated with that approach. The rest of the world now has adopted it from Germany, which has swept every Paralympic final since 1988.
Germany’s team has aged, though, as Israel’s did, and its run is in jeopardy. Poland edged Germany as world champion in 1998, and Kohl has found he just could not let his time as a Paralympic athlete end on that note.
‘It’s been a big portion of my life,’ he said. ‘It got me a lot of real-life experience. I was not so outgoing in the past, when I was younger. But getting into this national-team environment, then the international environment, then becoming involved in the politics a little bit as an athletes representative, it’s been great.
‘Basically, also, I’ve been trying to help to demonstrate what it means if you do elite-level sport,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s disabled, but so what, you know? Look at it. I was really proud and excited being able to be part of that, to demonstrate it all the time. It definitely means a lot.’
Indeed, in the twilight of his career, Kohl sees a new day dawning in disabled sport.
‘I thought the other day about, ‘What would it be (like) if I were maybe 19 or 20 now?” he said. ‘I see such gross improvements that you would not ever have thought about, from the national level in Germany to the international level.
‘I’m not jealous that I’m soon out of that, though,’ he said. ‘I just want to use my experience and my knowledge for the future generations of disabled athletes.’
After one last try at beating the new generation, that is.
Ron Sutton Olympics.com
Source: SOCOG