On February 11th from 11:05 p.m. on ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – In keeping with the conclusion of the new ORF series production “School of Champions (episodes seven and eight of season one on February 11th from 8:15 p.m. on ORF ON and in the TVthek app, on February 12th in the ORF 1 series Monday from 8:15 p.m ) on Sunday, February 11, 2024, from 11:05 p.m., the “dokFilm” will take a look, among other things, at the skiing nation of Austria and behind the scenes of a real Austrian ski high school. First on the program is an edition of the ORF series “Icons of Austria” with the title “Long live sport”, followed by the TV premiere of the cinema documentary “Stams”, co-financed by ORF as part of the film/television agreement (23.40 Clock).
“Icons of Austria – Long live sport” (11:05 p.m.):
Measured by its population, Austria is a dwarf state, number 94 in the world. Mr. and Mrs. Austrian are all the more pleased when he or she can be number one in sports every now and then. This happens most often in skiing, although this sport only really plays a role in an estimated five to seven countries – the rest of the world doesn’t care about skiing. When it comes to football, Austrians are less accustomed to success, but if you beat your sporting arch-enemy Germany once every 40 years, it’s the stuff of legends. It is striking that the nationalization of sport in this country was much stronger when Austria was not yet a member of the European Union and the Cold War still divided the world into good and evil. This edition of the “Icons of Austria” series takes us back to a time when sports heroines and heroes were created – mostly involuntarily – for the desire for recognition of a small nation: Hugo Meisl, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Annemarie Moser-Pröll. Martin Betz designed the film.
“Stams” (11.40 p.m.)
The Stams ski school is one of the most successful ski schools in the world. Young athletes grow up here and live out their passion without compromise. Sports greats such as Benjamin Raich and Gregor Schlierenzauer were trained here and made it to the Olympics – a dream that many students want to fulfill in Stams every year.
Director Bernhard Braunstein followed some of them with his camera for a year and takes a look behind the scenes of the elite sports high school in his documentary. He shows the strictly timed everyday life of hard training, lessons and boarding school life and thus also the high pressure that the children and young people are exposed to. In addition, there are a number of injuries that they accept for their careers. There is little time for a “normal” teenage life. Despite the sporting competition, the young athletes still have close friendships that make them a kind of community of shared destiny. In the shared moments between training, school and competition, they motivate each other, give each other comfort and laugh about their experiences. Despite all the efforts and sacrifices, in the end only one to two percent of all students manage to assert themselves in top-class sports. “Stams” is not a classic sports film that is about the heroization of top-class sport, but rather a sober look at a world of pressure to perform and succeed as well as the power and dependency relationships that go with it.