Lukas Dauser has never announced that he wants to win this or that title. His credo is: “I cannot defeat my opponent like a boxer. I can only do my best routine, and the judges decide the rest.” What he says: “I have a good routine on the parallel bars, and I know I have it.” And what he never forgets to say: “Everyone Competition starts at zero.”
In short, a mixture of moderation of self-imposed pressure, self-confidence and respect for the sporting opponent. With this attitude, Lukas Dauser became world champion on parallel bars in October. Before the final day in Antwerp, he had already presented the best parallel bars exercise in the world three times, but had nevertheless rejected the role of favorite and then delivered a performance that even the critical national coach Valeri Belenki labeled “perfect”.
Lukas Dauser subordinates everything to gymnastics
It is the first international title for the 30-year-old, who for years has been considered the ideal embodiment of all gymnast virtues: discipline, ambition, hard work in training. He had briefly lost these virtues in the spring. When returning to work after a shoulder injury was very difficult and his wife Viktoria had to move away from Halle for work reasons, the model boy became, in his own words, “undisciplined”, i.e. “sweets, eating badly, sometimes drinking alcohol”.
He struggled like never before and finally came up with a plan with his coach Hubert Brylok: give everything until Paris. The trust that Brylok gave him was “worth gold,” said Dauser shortly before his final appearance in Antwerp. He returned praise: “The boy really deserves it because he works so professionally.”
Published/Updated: Recommendations: 5 Anno Hecker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 7 Sandra Schmidt, Antwerp Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 4
Born in Munich in 1993, Lukas Dauser learned to love gymnastics from Kurt Szilier in Unterhaching. Having just come of age, he moved to Berlin at the request of the then national coach Andreas Hirsch. “I saw him at youth championships and said he could do gymnastics, even though the result lists didn’t speak for him,” said Hirsch in 2016, when Dauser competed in the Olympic Games for the first time.
In 2017, at the age of 23, he won his first international medal, European Championship silver on parallel bars. In the same year he seriously injured his knee and two years later his hand. At some point the chemistry in Berlin was no longer right, and in the Corona summer of 2020, Dauser moved to Hubert Brylok – “to rely on this perfection,” as he once put it. Everything now seems to be going well in Halle: European Championship bronze and Olympic silver in 2021, World Cup silver in 2022, now the title.
Order and structure are important
Lukas Dauser sees gymnastics as his profession, to which he subordinates everything and about which he thinks a lot – about nutrition, working with visualizations of his exercises or the benefits of daily meditation. Order and structure are important concepts; always having a plan gives him security and peace. At the start of his national team career, a detailed description of the order in his training bag became legend.
There is also a bit of superstition: on important days, standing up with both feet at the same time so that it couldn’t have been the wrong foot, placing the gymnastics slippers next to each other to the millimeter in front of the apparatus, or holding on to the competition underwear that brings luck, which is why the tube of hand detergent never missing from your luggage.
Lukas Dauser has also learned over the years that the plans he has made are not set in stone and that, as he said last year, “just gymnastics isn’t good either.” He doesn’t just think about how to line up the highest difficulties between the bars as elegantly as possible. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, he reflected on what being a sports soldier ultimately means, namely being primarily a soldier.
In the debate about the participation of Russian gymnasts in Paris 2024, Dauser explicitly spoke out against this on several occasions. As a spokesman for active members, he prepares meticulously for meetings in the association, takes the floor and takes a position. He sees winning medals as a fundamental goal of all competitive athletes, but also to be a role model for the younger ones in the national team.
