A 12-year-old boy watches sports videos on YouTube.

He sees a skier standing on a slab of snow on the ridge, with the abyss in front of him.

The man pushes off, swings in the narrow crevice, jumps out into the depths with a backflip.

The slab of snow comes loose behind him.

"Wow, awesome," exclaims the teenager, "I want that too."

Anno Hecker

Responsible editor for sports.

  • Follow I follow

Dietrich Mateschitz inspired young people.

He moved generations of athletes to give free rein to their passion, to develop their talent, to find out what they can achieve.

On Sunday you can read and hear about these tributes from the world of sport.

They come from all corners of the world.

The tenor: great gratitude for the impact of the Austrian, who died on Saturday at the age of 78 as a result of a serious illness.

"Dietrich Mateschitz", says the sports director of the Red Bull Formula 1 team, Helmut Marko, "was an outstanding personality.

He has shaped the sport significantly.”

In 2005, the Formula 1 experts laughed

Mateschitz was above all a marketing man.

There is hardly anyone on this planet who appeared more invisible in the show society of top-class sport and yet had so much influence.

When Formula 1 stopped moving in 2020 due to the pandemic, he created the conditions on his racetrack for re-entry in the summer, engineered with the help of politics and an expensive hygiene concept.

essential for survival.

Maybe not for him as a businessman, the multi-billionaire.

But the can had to roll again.

As much as he avoided interviews, preferred to only answer questions in writing, liked to take cover in front of camera teams, he was also active as an offensive advertiser for his business, the sale of Red Bull shower, a kind of drinkable glue for connecting sport and Consumption.

How did the experts in Formula 1 laugh when Red Bull got involved in 2005.

A fun group in the traditional dead-serious British motorsport world, with booming basses in the pits, bringing a new lightness to the paddock.

fun

Five years later, the triumphal procession began with Sebastian Vettel.

Today Max Verstappen dominates.

Nobody laughs anymore.

Red Bull is also in a fierce battle.

The World Automobile Association will announce the penalty for exceeding the budget cap in the next few days.

McLaren speaks of fraud affecting the performance of the cars.

Red Bull is outraged.

What happened to the cool?

Even in football, the group does not have an easy game.

Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig appear to traditionalists as a marketing tool worthy of rejection.

Although the teams show a culture of play and the clubs do professional, valued youth work.

Eight pilots from the current Formula 1 driver field have benefited from the promotion.

Thanks to the subsidiary team Alpha Tauri, talented people are introduced to the mother team Red Bull in tough competition. None of the competitors has worked so systematically on pilot training in the past 17 years.

Red Bull wants to develop athletes, possibly adapt them, not buy stars or after their zenith.

Why else the construction of the sports performance center in Thalgau near Salzburg?

Doctors, diagnosticians, physiotherapists work on the form of athletes, get them back on their feet after injuries or make them hurt.

Everything from the best, in any case across borders.

Mateschitz brushed off criticism when Red Bull appointed the German doctor Bernd Pansold as head in 2003, even though he had been convicted of doping underage swimmers in the GDR.

Mateschitz, he was quoted as saying, was not interested: "Yesterday's snow."