Early and Personal Life
Matthias Steiner was born in Vienna, Austria. He hails from Obersulz in Lower Austria, where he attended Volksschule (primary school), then Hauptschule (secondary school). Steiner completed an apprenticeship in plumbing.
He started weightlifting in 1995. His father, Friedrich Steiner, a 20-time IWF-Masters World Weightlifting Champion, and also ranks first on the IWF 2008 Hall of Fame Survey of Leading Master Lifters.
Since an untreated infection Steiner suffers from diabetes, diagnosed at his 18th birthday. Before the diagnosis, the first symptom was an intense thirst, then he lost appetite, and 5 kilograms (11 lb) body weight within three months. He went to the doctor when his sight deteriorated.
Despite the diagnosis he followed his dream to become a weightlifter.
In 2004, a German woman from Zwickau in Saxony had watched Steiner participating in weightlifting contests on TV. She kept asking the Eurosport commentators for his email address, until they gave it to her. She contacted Steiner, and he agreed to meet her in Lower Austria. They married shortly thereafter and hence he moved to Germany, where he then applied for German citizenship.
On July 16, 2007 his wife Susann died in a car accident. Despite the tragic loss, and after losing 7 kilograms (15 lb) or 8 kilograms (18 lb) body weight, he was able to continue his training.
In October 2008, Steiner met German TV-newsreader Inge Posmyk. They married in January 2010.
Read more about this topic: Matthias Steiner
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, early, personal and/or life:
“He hadn’t known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)
“It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)