Leon Štukelj
1898 – 1999 · Slovenia
Known for: Slovenian gymnast, Olympic champion in 1924 and 1928, who lived to be a hundred
“A hundred years lived upright.”
Biography
Leon Štukelj was born in 1898 in Kandija, a settlement on the edge of Novo mesto that became part of the town in 1923, then in Austria-Hungary and today in Slovenia. He grew up inside the Sokol movement, the Slavic gymnastic society whose halls served a nation that did not yet have a state of its own, and where gymnastics was a matter of bearing as much as of strength. That bearing stayed with him for a century. Alongside training he studied law and graduated in 1927, so his years of competition ran in parallel with a profession that had nothing to do with sport. He was never a full time athlete in the modern sense, and he did not become one when the medals began to arrive.
Štukelj reached the top of international gymnastics at the World Championships held in Ljubljana in 1922 and remained there for fourteen years. At the Paris Olympics of 1924 he won two gold medals for Yugoslavia, in Amsterdam in 1928 he took a gold and two bronze medals, and in Berlin in 1936, at the age of thirty seven, he won silver on the rings and closed his competitive career. Across seven major international competitions he collected twenty medals in all: eight gold, six silver and six bronze. This was gymnastics before sponsorship and full time coaching, in which a competitor travelled by train, performed, and returned to work on Monday. In his case the work was the bench. He became a judge, first in his home town of Novo mesto, later in Lenart and finally in Maribor.
The years after the Second World War were the hardest of his life. Štukelj had no sympathy for the new communist authorities, had been close to the royalist resistance and had maintained contacts with the British, and the regime treated him accordingly: he was imprisoned, then released, then permanently barred from the bench, and he spent the rest of his working life as a legal assistant. Public recognition came back late. In 1996 he was presented at the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympic Games as the oldest living Olympic champion and handed out the medals in the men's team competition, and in 1997 he entered the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame. He died in Maribor on 8 November 1999, four days short of his hundred and first birthday. Sports halls in Novo mesto and at the University of Maribor carry his name.