Willie Weiler

German-born Willie Weiler took up gymnastics at the age of 14 and was a junior national champion by 1956. One year later, he moved to Toronto and became a Canadian national champion at the senior level, his first of six titles earned through 1966. He was the first three-time consecutive winner of Canada’s Norton H. Crow Award for excellence in amateur athletics, earning it in 1961, 1962, and 1963. He did not receive his Canadian citizenship until 1962, however, and thus his international début had to wait until the 1963 Pan American Games. His performance did not disappoint at this tournament, as he captured a total of eight medals: gold in the all-around, floor exercise, and horse vault; silver in the parallel bars, pommeled horse, and horizontal bar, and bronze in the rings. He was less successful at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, with his best finish being joint-fourteenth with Takashi Ono in the horse vault. His signature move, the “Weiler Kip”, is still used as a dismount from the horizontal bar.

By career, Weiler joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1958 and worked as a physical trainer in the military. He retired after the Tokyo Games, but returned in Mexico City in 1968 as a coach with the national team, and in 1972 and 1976 as a gymnastics judge. He retired from the military in 1991. He was made a member of the Canadian Olympic (1967), the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (1968) and the Canadian Forces (1971) and London (Ontario) Sports Halls of Fame (2013). He was also invested into the Order of Canada in 1977 and received a Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2012.