Peter Filzmaier

Breathless: My Favorite Sports Stories
Peter Filzmaier

Right in the middle of the Football World Cup, political scientist Peter Filzmaier proves that the world almost lost a gifted sports storyteller. From Austrian and Spanish footballers to American basketball stars, African world-record runners, and Australian swimmers – it has always been major sporting events that made Peter’s heart beat faster than any political reporting ever could.

Peter Filzmaier is widely known to the public as a political analyst for ORF and as a guest commentator in national and international newspapers. But did you know that Filzmaier’s sharpest TV analysis on a political program was largely based on his knowledge of Formula 1? As a child, little Peter dreamed of becoming a sports reporter and remains a huge sports fan to this day.

He even wrote his doctoral thesis on “Political Aspects of the Olympic Games.” He first fulfilled his boyhood dream indirectly with his 2020 sports book full of personal stories from his sporting experiences: Breathless: My Favorite Sports Stories. In 2024, his second book followed, Olympics: The Games as a Stage for Sport and Politics. He masters the passionate, refreshingly unreserved perspective of a fan just as naturally as the critical insight shaped by his political analyses into the obsession with records. You can hear and see his favorite stories of wonderful sporting experiences at Theater im Park.

For ORF, Peter Filzmaier regularly analyzed social contexts of the 2021 European Football Championship and the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games in the program Heimspiel. Three years later, he appeared at EURO 2024 alongside Austria’s Footballer of the Century Herbert Prohaska and at the Olympic Games in Paris in the TV studio.

Filzmaier also provided live commentary for the Linz Marathon six times, which almost always featured a course record – and once his partner became Austrian national champion. This, as he wryly recalls, created a conflict-of-interest issue, but which sports reporter can boast such a track record? ;)

Peter Filzmaier also runs a sports blog at https://atemlos.at and in 2024, together with Servus TV journalist Alina Marzi, created the podcast Sport am Wort for Red Bull. He also writes columns for The Red Bulletin.

As an athlete, Filzmaier was once an enthusiastic recreational runner with a 10-kilometer personal best of under 33 minutes and a half-marathon time of one hour and twelve minutes. On Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky, and other platforms, he focuses exclusively on sports for a total of one hundred thousand followers.

Program and cast