ARD series: “School of Champions”: For winter sports fans and lowland Tyroleans

The path of Homo hauptensis appears to be motorized in different ways. While the Swiss sports ace Nawal (Luna Mwezi) rolls up to the Gastein Ski Academy in a brand new Stuttgart-design SUV, the local farmer Strobl (Thomas Mraz) drives his equally ambitious daughter Dani (Emilia Warenski) to the ski academy in a rusty VW flatbed. » School of Champions” in order to be trained to become a professional in the series of the same name for a fee.

Already at the beginning of the first of eight parts, the social gap is visibly dug up: Here, filthy rich Swiss people who push their spoiled brats to achieve top performance in an elite institution and also represent this materially, there, poor agrarians for whom such nonsense only breaks their tight budget and At the same time, you can also hire family harvest helpers. The lines of conflict are clear in this co-production between ORF, BR and SRF. That’s the first impression.

At second glance, the fictional competitive sports study by the young “Tatort” author Samuel Schultschik outlines the sophisticated training system for talented young athletes. But his two directors Dominik Hartl and Johanna Moder are allowed to do this a little outside of the worn-out clichés from hockey mom to working poor. Dani Strobl, literally embodied by the talented acting teenager Emilia Warenski (“Steirerrausch”), remains as little as she appears to be as is her competitor Nawal.

The latter is not just black and therefore the exact opposite of alpine winter sports stereotypes; Despite all her unambitious mother’s objections, she really wants one of the ten coveted Gastein starting places – which, by the way, the cunning Dani managed to steal from her much better twin sister without her fame-hungry dad noticing or wanting to notice.

Shortly afterwards, both of them find themselves roommates in the cadre factory of the aasy chairman of the board of directors, Schiesstl (Gregor Seberg), who forces his institution director Mark Auer (Jakob Seeböck) to fill the fresh U16 class not just in terms of sport, but also economically. After all, the boarding school depends on money from regional investors. And they want local color combined with global recognition, which is why the former ski star Auer includes both his flighty son Nikki (Imre Lichtenberger) and the less talented Dani in the select circle.

Someone who – after all, we are in public entertainment – ​​is not just concerned with “will, discipline and three things: training, training, training,” as the school director greets the new students. No, all sorts of all-too-human aspects of adolescents are also negotiated. Friendship, competition, love, loyalty, boundaries, exclusion – the well-filled cutlery box of modern coming-of-age material, which David Schalko doesn’t fill with Austrian nonsense here. On the contrary.

Completely humorless, his production company Superfilm forces the personality development of its protagonists into a sports-capitalist corset that leaves both – puberty and politics – enough room to develop freely. While the coaching duo Franzi (Josephine Ehlert) and Albin (Ferdinand Hofer) push the teenagers physically to their limits, which they also explore psychologically with copious amounts of hormones and alcohol, the suicide of a supposedly overwhelmed student brings the microcosm of ski boarding school into the macrocosm of elbow society .

With a portion of ski acrobatics worth seeing in front of the picturesque mountain range in the Salzburger Land, the opportunity for advancement is finally de-romanticized as part of the perfidious self- and external-exploitation machine of professional business. “This isn’t about sport, it’s about politics,” says the peroxide-blond ski official Schiesstl, backing his demand for local color in the squad, asserting himself against the morally upright academy boss and thus underscoring a system of mutual rivalries that even incites relatives against one another.

Germany against Austria, city against country, poor against rich, conservative against progressive, young against old, strong against weak, sister against sister, father against son, all against all: Given the many front lines, one could easily lose track – would David Schalko not dramaturgically calling his team to order and making “School of Champions” a remarkably calm television series despite the mass-compatible topic. Six hours of winter sports entertainment that is equally rich for ski fans and lowland Tyroleans.

Available in the ARD media library