Standing races, field handball, weightlifting – these and other disciplines once dominated the sport. Then came football and flattened everything. A memory of faded idols like Max Reiter and a woman who lifted three men.
from
Hans Kratz
“It was a sensation, it was pure thrill,” enthuses the sports journalist Manfred Marr about the standing races, which once thrilled tens of thousands of spectators at the Nuremberg-Reichelsdorf cycle track. So on the track on which sports history was written for almost a hundred years. If it is soon torn down, a sport that at times even surpassed football will disappear with it. Marr can still hear the infernal noise of the machines, as well as the daring overtaking manoeuvres, when several teams went full throttle side by side into the banked curves and the audience screamed and groaned loudly with a thirst for sensation.