DR. CHRISTIAN WACKER is an archaeologist and sports historian. His main field of research is ancient sports history, but also 19th century and Olympic sports history. He organized around 30 sports exhibitions internationally during the last 17 years.
He worked as an archaeologist at the excavation of ancient Olympia, Greece in the 90ies and received his PhD for a thesis about the gymnasium at Olympia. After that he joined a scientific publishing house and led the editorial office.
From 2005 to 2008, he directed the German Sports and Olympia Museum in Cologne and he had been the Director of the Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum in Doha, Qatar from 2008 to 2014. From 2014 to 2018 he took over the responsibility to build a Museum Academy at the University in Freiburg, Germany. He was Director of the Karl-May-Museum (2018 to 2020; Dresden, Germany), directs the Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Center in Kuwait (2020 to 2022) and joined Qatar Museums again in 2022.
He had been teaching at various universities and published 15 books and around 80 papers about sports history, archaeology and museology. In 2022 he published two books about ‘Sports in Museum’ about best museum practice in relation to sports.
He is a member of various academic associations as well as the co-founder of the German Society for the History of Sports Science. Since 2012 he is Vice-President and since 2020 President of the International Society of Olympic Historians ISOH, from 2015 to 2018 ordinary Board Member for the Sport Museum Switzerland (2025-18). Furthermore, he is full member of the IOC Culture and Olympic Heritage Commission since 2022.