Franz Ferdinand Leopold Stampfl MBE (born Vienna 18 November 1913 – died 19 March 1995 Melbourne) was one of the world's leading athletics coaches in the twentieth century.
Stampfl was posthumously awarded the World Athletics Heritage Plaque[1] as a "legendary and pioneering coach" on 26 September 2019.
In 1937 sensing the rise of Adolf Hitler and having been banned after refusing to obey instructions from Austrian Olympic officials, he left Austria for England to study at the Chelsea School of Art.
Having taught skiing back in his homeland, Stampfl pitched AAA officials to coach their athletes, earning him a job in Northern Ireland.
Early one July morning in 1940, Stampfl was on his way to Canada on the liner ship SS Arandora Star with a host of other prisoners of war.
[6] To survive, Stampfl forced a steel plate aside to get to the surface and then jumped into the freezing cold, oil-slicked sea.
The Headmaster of Queen Elizabeth's, Ernest Jenkins, later observed that, under the relevant order, even friendly Germans and Austrians were arrested.
[11] Although he suffered terribly over the previous years and had trouble sleeping under linen or far from an open window because of his long confinement, he still admired the English for their love of amateur sport, and felt their athletes could use his help.
He established a training base at the Duke of York's Barracks and had part-time coaching posts at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
Still he was not asked to aid the British Olympic team in 1952 – evidence that amateur officials never brought him fully into their fold because he was an outsider.
Franz Stampfl, who worked at John Fisher school as athletics coach from 1950 to 1955, emigrated to Australia, training the Australian Squad in preparation for the Melbourne Olympic Games.
[13] A humble man, the Austrian coach had ignored the hype after Bannister's Iffley Road triumph, preferring to slip away quietly and get back to London to train other athletes.
He didn't need to stand around and have his picture taken by Bannister's side nor claim that the four-minute mile had been achieved through strict adherence to his coaching.
[17] Stampfl was a great proponent of the interval style of training where athletes run high-intensity distance trials followed by short recovery periods.