SPORTS FLASHBACK 2006: Steinbach native’s Swiss team humbles Canadians at Olympics

February of 2006 was an exhilarating time for the Krueger family in Steinbach, Winnipeg and New York, and of course, in Switzerland when the impossible happened and the Swiss national hockey team humbled Canada’s highly-touted Olympic squad with a 2-0 shutout in Turin, Italy.

While millions of Canadians were left dumbfounded by such an unexpected outcome against the winner of the gold medal in Salt Lake City four years ago, the family of Swiss head coach Ralph Krueger were a little less surprised. At the same time, they couldn’t have been more proud.

“We’re in heaven this week,” exclaimed his older brother Stefan, at his home in Steinbach, where he lived with his 88-year-old father, long-time physician Dr Karl H. Krueger.

The “we” Stefan referred to was his sisters Christiane and Evelyn in Winnipeg, Birgit in New York, and their families.

Stefan, working for a computer firm in Winnipeg at the time, after years as a medical researcher in the city, says he and other family members were in constant touch with each other, as their suddenly-famous brother found himself at the center of international attention.

Everyone, it seems, wanted to know how Ralph Krueger could have raised a hockey team from relative obscurity to the point where Wayne Gretzky’s hand-picked squad of superstars would be out-skated and out-played.

Stefan, however, says it may not be so difficult to see how it happened if one understands his brother’s philosophy of achieving success, his belief that team spirit ultimately counts for more than individual success.

It was this same philosophy that earned him his first successes as a coach in Austria, where over five years he led a struggling team to the European championship.

He had taken his first coaching job shortly after retiring from active play in the German hockey league, which he entered in 1979 as a 20-year-old.

Coaching success in Austria led him to Switzerland, where he took over as head coach of the national team, shortly after the 1998 Olympics in Japan.

Along with success behind the bench, over the past few years, came accolades for his 2001 book, Ueber Niederlagen zum Erfolg (Overcoming Obstacles on the Way to Success), which sold 50,000 copies in Switzerland in the first months after its release, and his busy off-season schedule as a sought-after motivational speaker.

Ralph, like many local kids, learned his early skating skills on the old outdoor rink, just a few hundred feet from the family home on Elmdale Street. Ralph was only about five when he learned to skate and soon developed a passion for the game of hockey. He attended St John’s Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg from grades four to nine, and then received his high school education at Steinbach Regional Secondary School.

After playing two years in the Western Canadian Hockey League in New Westminster and Calgary, Ralph joined the Duesseldorf EG of the Bundesliga (German hockey league). He ended his playing career in Rosenheim in 1991.