Peter Filzmaier - Breathless: My Most Beautiful Sports Stories

In the midst of the World Cup, political scientist Peter Filzmaier demonstrates that a gifted storyteller of sports was almost lost in him. From Austrian and Spanish footballers to American basketball stars, African marathon record holders, and Australian swimmers – it has always been great sporting events that made Peter's heart race much more than any political reporting. Peter Filzmaier is well-known to the general public as a political analyst for ORF and as a guest commentator in national and international newspapers. But did you know that Filzmaier's most pointed television analysis in a political show was primarily based on his knowledge of Formula 1? As a child, little Peter dreamed of becoming a sports reporter and remains a huge sports fan to this day. He even wrote his doctoral thesis on "Political Aspects of the Olympic Games." He initially fulfilled his childhood dream indirectly with his 2020 sports book full of personal stories about sports experiences: "Breathless: My Most Beautiful Sports Stories." In 2024, he followed up with his second book "Olympia: The Games as a Stage for Sports and Politics." He effortlessly masters both the passionate and refreshingly unfiltered fan perspective as well as the critique of record-seeking that is clearly shaped by his political analyses. You can hear and see his favorite stories of wonderful sports experiences at the Theater im Park.

For ORF, Peter Filzmaier regularly analyzed the societal contexts of the 2021 European Football Championship and the 2021 Olympic Games in the show "Heimspiel." Three years later, he was at EURO 2024 alongside Austria's Footballer of the Century, Herbert Prohaska, and in Paris at the Olympic Games in the TV studio. Filzmaier also commented live on the marathon in Linz six times for ORF, where there was almost always a course record, and once his partner became the Austrian champion. This led – as he wryly recounts – to a conflict of interest, but which sports reporter has such a successful track record? ;)

Peter Filzmaier also runs a sports blog at atemlos.at and created the podcast "Sport am Wort" in 2024 for Red Bull together with Servus TV journalist Alina Marzi, as well as writing columns for The Red Bulletin. As an athlete, Filzmaier was once an active amateur runner with a personal best of under 33 minutes for 10 kilometers and a half-marathon time of one hour and twelve minutes. On Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky & Co, he focuses exclusively on sports for a total of one hundred thousand followers.