ISOH Lifetime Award 2023 Announcement
The International Society of Olympic Historians proudly announces the recipient of the ISOH Lifetime Award for 2023: Prof. Dr. Ingomar Weiler. This prestigious award recognizes Mr. Weiler’s exceptional contributions to the Olympic Movement as a distinguished Austrian ancient sport historian.
Biography
Ingomar Weiler, was born 28 April 1938 in Treglwang, Styria and graduated from the teacher training college in Salzburg. He completed his teacher training in history and physical education in Graz in 1962 with a dissertation under Erich Swoboda on Pannonia in the Diocletian period. Weiler then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Ancient History at the University of Innsbruck. In 1969 followed a one-year research stay at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. In 1972, he habilitated in Innsbruck on the topic “Der Agon im Mythos. On the attitude of the Greeks to competition”. In 1976 he accepted a professorship at the Karl Franzens University in Graz, where he held the chair at the Institute of Ancient History and Classical Studies until his retirement in March 2002. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Mainz.
Justification
In his research, Weiler combines sport with the thematic complex of ancient history. This focus includes above all the problems surrounding the origins of sport, criticism of the Olympics, spectator behaviour as well as didactic tasks. Ingomar Weiler has researched and disseminated ancient sports history like no other over the last 50 years and, above all, brought it closer to a broad audience in the sports world. He has been teaching at the IOA for many decades and has popularised ancient sports history by lecturing tirelessly and for hours at Olympia and other excavation sites on the nature of the agon. Unlike many other colleagues in his field, Ingomar Weiler has always sought and found interdisciplinary contact outside of ancient studies with sports science.
Publications
Ingomar Weiler published a series of extremely important books dedicated to ancient sports history. The most important are “Der Agon im Mythos” (The Agon in mythology) from 1974 and “Der Sport bei den Völkern der Alten Welt“ (Sports at the people of the ancient world) from 1988. These books became standard readings not only for the scientific community. Ingomar Weiler was the initiator of the world-wide respected journal Nikephoros and the collection of ancient texts about the sports in antiquity. Ingomar Weiler published more than 100 papers about sports history in antiquity, mostly in German.
Please join us in congratulating Ingomar Weiler on this well-deserved award.
The award ceremony will take place this year in Graz/Austria.
The Executive Board,
International Society of Olympic Historians
August 29, 2023
There are no comments published yet.