“Maybe he was thinking too much”

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Rolf Klarer can still remember it like it was yesterday. “We were at the training camp with the Northwest Swiss Wrestling Association in Willisau. On Saturday we went to the indoor pool. There we just made rope and struggled in the water like little kids. Jörg then had to leave in the evening because his mother Ida celebrated her 70th birthday on Sunday. Before he left, I said goodbye to him. That was the last time I saw him.”

A day later, on March 29, 1998, Jörg Schneider was dead, he took his own life at the age of 37. Even today, 25 years later, his friends can’t let go of the why question.

Schneider was once one of the most successful wrestlers in the country. At the 1977 ESAF in Basel, he won his first of six federal crowns, although he was not yet 16. He won four times at the Northwest Swiss. And in 1992 he was in the last round at the Bundestag in Olten (lost to Silvio Rüfenacht).

His best workout? The renovation of his house

Heinrich “Heiri” Liechti was something like Schneider’s foster father. When Jörg was twelve, they met in the Basel-Stadt wrestling club. “Jörg has always been a handsome guy,” recalls the then technical director, “you immediately saw that he had great potential. He was a real fighter.”

Schneider later moved to eastern Switzerland. He worked as a carpenter and plumber and trained in the Winterthur wrestling club. There he met Noldi Ehrensberger. “Jörg was a very strong person,” says the wrestler king of 1977, “you could hardly beat him. He could have wrestled king.”

When Schneider returned to Baselland after a few years, a close friendship developed between him and fellow wrestler Rolf Klarer. The two even worked for the same company. The four-time Confederation is still enthusiastic about him: “Jörg was a very nice, friendly and correct person and a great athlete. He has always impressed me. When he did something, it was always 100 percent. He was very thoughtful and thought about it a lot. Maybe too much.”

Klarer especially remembers how Schneider almost alone renovated his cottage in Reinach. “He dug out the basement by hand. Only with a shovel and a kettle. With manpower he hoisted himself up and emptied the dirt from boiler after boiler. This is the best training for him, he always told me. He was such a strong man, a mountain of a man.”

“It was his free decision”

But what did it really look like in him? No one knew or suspected that. Nor that his life would end so tragically on March 29, 1998. It is clear that at one point he hurriedly left his mother’s birthday party and never returned. “Years before that there was a suicide in the wrestling club. I also talked to Jörg about it at the time. He told me that something like that would never be an option for him,” says Klarer.

Klarer is still preoccupied with why. And the self-blame is still there. “Certainly in the beginning you always wonder if I shouldn’t have noticed something. To this day I don’t know what got him off track. But that was his free decision. You have to accept that, even if it’s hard for you.”

At the abdication ceremony, Klarer carried the wrestling association’s flag and Heiri Liechti gave a speech. “The funeral was incredibly painful. That’s when I really came into ‘life’,” says 81-year-old Liechti.

In the years that followed, Liechti often went to Jörg Schneider’s grave and talked to him. “’You are a stupid boy,’ I often told him in the graveyard, although I liked him so much. I just couldn’t understand why he did that. This question will never leave me.”

Source : Blick