Karl Quade (1954–2025)
Three days before New Year’s Eve, the German Disabled Sports Association (DBS) and the National Paralympic Committee announced that former DBS Vice President Karl Quade had died at the age of 71. “Parasport is not only missing an extraordinary official, but also a designer with passion, a committed contemporary witness and a person who embodied the Paralympic idea like no other,” it said in a joint obituary. Karl Quade took part in three Paralympics, winning the gold medal with the stand volleyball team in 1988. He then led the German Paralympics team as Chef de Mission fifteen times since 1996. “As a face and with his heart, he played a key role in shaping the Paralympic movement in Germany,” said DBS Honorary President Friedhelm Julius Beucher, praising the achievements of the sports scientist with a doctorate.
However, there was no official information, press release or obituary from the association for one of its most successful athletes. Manfred Emmel from Frankfurt am Main won a total of nine gold and eleven silver medals at the Paralympic Games between 1968 and 1988. Only two plaques less than sports shooter Siegmar Henker, the most decorated German disabled athlete to date, who died in 2009. Unlike today’s successful paraathletes, who are awarded medals, are involved in the promotion of elite sports and receive media attention, their predecessors seem to be something like “unknown beings”. Not even the lists of their sporting successes are exact, as a look at the official statistics from the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), which the DBS relies on, illustrates. There, three of Henker’s Paralympic medals, which he won between 1976 and 1996, are embezzled. For Manfred Emmel there are even five.
A dive into a swimming lake was fatal for Emmel, then 17 years old: irreversible paraplegia. But the young man came to terms with the wheelchair. “Manni”, born on October 8, 1945, collected more medals than anyone else as a para table tennis player on the then exclusively “green table”. He had already played as a nine-year-old. In 1988 at the Paralympics in Seoul, South Korea, he said goodbye to the big international stage with gold in singles and doubles, on which he had had a furious debut at the 1968 Paralympics in Tel Aviv with victory in singles and second place in doubles.
He was at the top of the winner’s podium at the Paralympics a dozen times. As a table tennis player, but also three times as a swimmer. In 1976 he also brought home a silver medal in the discus throw from Toronto. In addition to his 20 Paralympics medals, Emmel won 23 national table tennis championships in singles and doubles, two World Cup victories in Australia in 1987 and seven European Championship titles.
But the trained electrician or electronics technician was not only one of the greats as an active person. He trained the youngsters at his Seckbach home club from an early age. A remarkable era as a sports official followed. He held the position of federal specialist for table tennis in the German Disabled Sports Association and was at the top of the German Wheelchair Sports Association (DRS). He was also there when the Hessian Disabled Sports Association for paraplegics was founded in 1967. Renamed the Wheelchair Sports Club Frankfurt (RSC) in 1978, Emmel was particularly involved in setting up the table tennis division and later took over the RSC chairmanship.
Long-time members of “Manni’s” division in the east of Frankfurt fondly remember training evenings with the RSC para players. The friendly games he organized in the sports hall of the vocational development center in Bad Vilbel are also unforgettable – inclusion in action. Manfred Emmel’s death wasn’t worth a single line to the DBS when he died in October shortly before his 80th birthday. Maybe at least the statistics will be corrected for once.
