Holding Back The Years: Franz Stampfl

Until May 6, 1954, Franz Stampfl was an unknown
Austrian refugee who, in the chaotic months before
the outbreak of World War II, ended up in England,
before finding himself in internment camps in Canada and Australia, then back in England again.
Stampfl was a former art student, a talented skier,
an all-round track-and-field athlete and a gifted trainer.
But from May 6,1954, Stampfl would forever be the man who trained Roger Bannister, who, on that day, in Oxford, became the first man to run the mile in under four minutes.

And immediately, the method – interval training – became as famous as the man. As a young skier, Stampfl had grown used to intensive training. When he changed to track-andfield, he was shocked by how little athletes trained and by the poor quality of their work. Their only yardstick was results: the distance jumped or the time run. “There was constant experimentation, but it was mostly geared towards making our movement look rhythmic and rounded,” he recalled. “So we came across as elegant but our performances weren’t up to much.” The fashion of the day put little store in training. “We thought that only someone without much talent had to train, and that it was shameful for someone with talent to do it.”

Early in 1938, drawing on his experience from other sports, Stampfl began to develop a more scientific training method based on physiology and biomechanics. For runners, the concept was based on disciplined interval training: different distances at different speeds, heavy workloads, constant checks of all parameters, an emphasis on stamina and speed. By now in England, he tested his method on a number of athletes – expertise for which they paid around 􀃶1.70 a day in today’s money. His jackpot came with Bannister’s record and, a year later, he took his know-how to Australia. Stampfl’s belief in interval training wasn’t based solely on the fact that it produced better performances; it also made it easier to keep training records: athletes always had an idea of what they were doing and whether it was enough, so they became preconditioned to the stresses and strains of competition.

To succeed with Stampfl’s method, athletes had to be tough on themselves – as he had learned to be on his way to internment in Canada. He was one of 400 to survive after his ship sank in bitter seas, hours away from rescue – 2000 others drowned. Australian Ralph Doubell, guided by Stampfl to 800m gold at the 1968 Olympics, described him as a dictator, who ignored his athletes’ complaints, even if they were injured. “He would say, ‘Just ignore it, it’s only pain.’” Englishman Christopher Chataway, who, along with his compatriot Chris Brasher, was one of Bannister’s pace-makers and who himself became a world-record holder over three miles in 1955, called Stampfl ‘a genius’.

After the exhausting training sessions, Stampfl would often sit down with his protégés, drink a few bottles of wine with them and inspire and motivate them with heated but humorous discussions. Chataway explains: “He gave you the feeling that records and medals weren’t just attainable but that they were also worth all the effort.” Stampfl never distinguished between body and mind when it came to training as, in his view, both were equally important. He became living proof of his belief in 1980, when a car accident that left him quadriplegic couldn’t stop him coaching. “Sometimes I think my ideal athlete should have the soul of a poet – a man rich in fantasy and imagination who can deal with intense physical, intellectual and spiritual phenomena,” he once observed.

He was always willing to play down his own abilities, as he did on Australian radio show The Sports Factor: “The training methods are not majorly important; it’s how they’re administered. I don’t want to play down my own role as a coach but if you’re badly organised, you can be the Jesus Christ of trainers but you’ll still never deliver a performance that people will speak about.”

Article is courtesy of Red Bulletin