This Thursday, in Buenos Aires, he died Tito Steiner. An outstanding Argentine athlete in the 70s, he was 72 years old, and he excelled in the decathlon, a specialty in which our country never again had representatives of his hierarchy.
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Tito Steiner was born on March 1, 1952, in Colonia Obligado, Paraguay, descendant of a family of German immigrants. His family arrived in Argentina when little Tito was barely six years old. He soon began to play sports in the German Gymnastics Society of Villa Ballester, and excelled in athletics and handball; He began to delve deeper into the greatest Olympic sport, with the help of Professor Raúl Zabala. “The 1968 Olympic year raised concerns in me about athletics. It was widely spread in the newspapers and I started looking for a place to practice. That’s how I came to German Society,” he said years later in an interview with El Grafico magazine.
Throughout his career he was a representative of the SAG of Villa Ballester. He debuted on the Parque Chacabuco track in 1972 and won the national championship, an achievement that he would obtain on three other occasions (1973, 1976 and 1978). In 1973, he managed to break the national decathlon record that had remained unchanged for 25 years, and improve Jorge Kistenmacher’s previous mark.
Two years later, he won his first South American championship and took 4th place at the Pan American Games in Mexico. After the Montreal Games, he accepted a proposal he received from Brigham Young University, in Provo, and moved to Utah, where he would have a better setting and adequate infrastructure to develop and compete alongside outstanding North American athletes. In 1977 he won the NCAA tournament and returned to our region to defend the South American Championship in Montevideo, in addition to being runner-up in the pole vault. In 1979, he reached second place and won the silver medal at the Pan American Games in Puerto Rico.
Two seasons later, he established the Argentine and South American decathlon record, adding 8,279 points. In 1982, he reached first place in the world ranking of this same discipline, and a year later, on June 23, 1983, in Provo, United States, he once again surpassed his own. Argentine, South American and Ibero-American record with 8291 points, which would later be the third world record of the season, but which, four decades later, remains an Argentine and South American record.
He was a three-time winner of the United States National University Championship and after his retirement he was inducted into the Brigham Young University Pumas Hall of Fame, an entity he represented during his stay in North America, where he studied and trained during several years.
Unfortunately, the big disappointment for Steiner was in the Olympic part. The decathlete was only able to attend the Montreal 1976 event, when he was still very young and with little experience in highly demanding competitions on an international level. He finished in 22nd place, with 7052 points, very far from the historic Bruce Jenner, owner of the gold with 8618, a new world record, with which he had also left behind the German Guido Kratschmer (8411).
Everything pointed to the 1980 Moscow Games, with the idea of seeking a Decathlon medal, already as one of the best athletes in the world in that discipline. However, he was not going to be able to compete in the then Soviet Union. First, after several months of rehearsal at the University of Mainz, in Germany, he was complicated by an injury to the meniscus in his right knee. And then, with the boycott promoted by the United States in the middle of the Cold War, and to which the Military Junta that then governed Argentina adhered.
“When I found out about the invasion of Afghanistan I thought that the Americans were going to react in some way and that the Olympic Games could be in danger. At the time the boycott thing came out, I was at 10 points of preparation. All my life I was training thinking about Moscow (…) There are journalists, athletes and leaders who want us to go to the Games, but I think the issue is discussed on a higher topic. (…) It is a bit the culmination of your career. For many, including me, there will not be another Olympic Games,” Steiner anticipated, in April 1980, in statements to El Grafico.
Just a couple of weeks later, the Argentine government confirmed its refusal to go to the USSR in support of the North American boycott. To make matters worse, he had to undergo surgery in Utah for that meniscus injury, and he only returned to compete several months later. He would not make it to the Los Angeles 1984 event. Years later, he would sadly remember that forced absence: “I was distressed for a long time. “They cut off my legs and hands.” Without being able to reach his best times, he retired from high competitions in 1983. Married to Hilde Malgay, he had three children: Herman, who also dedicated himself to the decathlon, Sabine and Christopher.