Valdemar “Valdy” Briedis

Valdemar “Valdy” Briedis

Born:

1918

Discipline:

Coach

Local Club:

Christchurch Technical

Valdemar “Valdy” Briedis's Story

New Zealand’s most successful coach across all track and field events was an immigrant from Latvia who created national and international medallists on an obscure windswept park in suburban Christchurch. Valdemar Briedis was the mentor of Marise Chamberlain and Valerie Sloper Young, who already have their own “Legends” pages on this site. He also helped create the careers of Barbara Poulsen Beable (shot, pentathlon), Diane Charteris (shot), Lorraine Norris (high jump), Gerry Hack (800m), Joanna Burr Hickman (200/400m), Sally Flynn Mene (javelin), Mene Mene (decathlon), Bev Peterson (sprints), Robin Tait (discus, shot), Lesley Wilson (high jump) and others whose achievements or contributions have been near-legendary. 

The stats are staggering. Briedis (known usually as “Valdy,” but often to younger athletes as “Mr Briedis”) coached the winners of 186 New Zealand championships. The New Zealand teams at every Olympic and Commonwealth Games from 1956 to 1978 included Briedis athletes, and he coached eleven New Zealand representatives in all. His athletes or former athletes) broke four world records, forty-six New Zealand records,  and won one Olympic bronze medal, one Olympic fourth place, seven Commonwealth gold, and two Commonwealth silver. He took athletes in every event in the track and field programme to national level or above. Through those who in turn became coaches, like Beable, Peterson, Mene, and Kevin Hickman, his ongoing legacy is incalculable. His dedication was equally staggering, putting in hours at Ensors Road Park (now gone) six evenings a week, year round, as well as all Saturday at the track in the summer season.

Before coming to New Zealand, Briedis’s life had been a mix of sporting achievement and sheer horror. Born two years after Latvia gained independence from the Germany Empire in 1919, he benefitted from the influence of German and Swedish educational methods, which placed high professional value on qualified sports coaching. He was a schools champion at shot put and long jump, and in winter a champion at distance skiing and ski jump. With national class junior performances in 100m, shot put, long jump, discus, and javelin, he was good enough to compete in the decathlon in the Youth Games held in conjunction with the Berlin Olympics in 1936, when he was 15 or 16. He gained a coaching diploma at the Latvian Sports Institute in Riga in 1938.

But World War 2 in 1939 brought repressive invasions of Latvia, first by Soviet Russia, then Nazi Germany, then again the Soviet Russian Empire, with the estimated deaths of more than 200,000 Latvian citizens, from a population of under two million. Both occupying armies conscripted young Latvian men. Briedis fought in the Latvian army, and then was conscripted by the German army. He escaped the final Soviet invasion by fleeing to the Netherlands in 1945, aged 24.

There he began to rebuild his life, becoming coach to various athletic clubs, and chief coach for North Holland in 1947. In that role, he prepared some Dutch athletes for the 1948 Olympic Games in London, and often spoke of Fanny Blankers-Koen (who won four gold medals) as a model of competitive versatility. He also spoke of Janis Stendzenieks, whom he coached, and who moved to the UK, where he won the AAA Javelin in 1947 and ’48. Briedis was asked to support the Dutch team for the 1952 Olympics, but by then, like many in the war-ravaged Netherlands at that date, he and his Latvian wife Laima (who died in 2020) had decided to emigrate to New Zealand. In that move, they followed his close Latvian friend Rudi Krauze, and his Dutch wife, whose daughter Olga (now Altments) is Briedis’s god-daughter, and kindly supplied some of these details.

A scientist, he found work in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. He had no intention of continuing in athletics in a country that did not regard coaching as a paid profession. But it happened. He started in Christchurch and had contact with the Crichton Cobbers club. After six months in Dunedin, he had moved back to Christchurch, and was living at Rangiora, when the former Dutch junior 800m champion, Joop van Kroningen, who had emigrated at the same time, asked Briedis to “give him a hand.” Briedis was doing that one night at Ensors Road Park, when he was approached by a 17-year-old woman runner who was about to try a comeback. See the Legends entry on Marise Chamberlain for the full story. In 1953, out of the blue, the Technical Club appointed him its chief coach, apparently without asking him about it first. He had now begun to coach Chamberlain, Valerie Sloper Young, and the women’s distance running pioneer Robin Hames. 

Briedis made Technical into a power house, probably the greatest source of emerging talent in the history of especially women’s athletics in New Zealand. His athletes are unanimous in describing him as a “demanding” coach, with his emphasis on drills and hard interval running, yet he was also “open to discussion,” as Beable recalls, and “an absolute gentleman.” They agree about his expert knowledge and in their gratitude for his total commitment to their progress. Like Arthur Lydiard, he had the great coach’s gift of envisioning and prioritising each athlete’s long-term development.

“Briedis was not a man who looked for short-term gains. He was one coach who had the wisdom and authority to hold his athletes on a leash until they were ready,” wrote Peter Heidenstrom in Athletes of the Century.  With Briedis, that often took the form of insisting that athletes diversify, experimenting to find their best discipline, delaying their specialised development. “No one was exempt. We all learnt to put the shot. The shot putters had to hurdle and jump, too,” distance runner Hames told Heidenstrom. He often steered women to try the pentathlon, and with Beable discovered a major dimension of talent. Mene won the New Zealand decathlon six times.

That emphasis on diversity came from the German influence in his own education, which showed also in his insistence on weight training, for women as well as men. “We called them weights, but actually they were pieces of old railway track cut up, which was all we could afford in those days,” said Hames.

Briedis’s international awareness was a rare strength in the insular New Zealand of the 1950s-’60s. He subscribed to the German magazine Leichtathletik [Athletics], a major source for technical training ideas, and brought copies to Ensors Road.      

Briedis gave an interview in 1970 to Rod Dew of the Press, who produced a perceptive profile. Among much else, Dew revealed that Briedis’s greatest wish was to be fully accepted as a New Zealander. “After all, I have been in New Zealand longer than any other country,” he told Dew. He loved New Zealand’s easy access to tramping and fishing, perhaps remembering the forests and long empty Baltic beaches of Latvia. Beable recalls that before the Canterbury Championships each February, “he would tell you what you were going to achieve, and then went fishing at Lake Brunner for his annual holiday, and left you to it. It was his way of further developing the mental strength of coping with competition.” He was there for them at Nationals and beyond.

Briedis must have felt fully accepted when he was appointed coach to the New Zealand Olympic team in 1972. He for sure earned acceptance when New Zealand’s 1974 Commonwealth Games team in his home town of Christchurch included an extraordinary seven former or present Briedis athletes (Beable, Sue Burnside, Roger Main, Mene Mene, Sally Mene, Tait, Young). He was awarded an MBE in 1976. The greatest testimony was in the lasting affection of his athletes, even long after his death in 1994. Beable still has the compassionate letter he wrote to her in 1976 to ease her disappointment at being rejected by the Olympic selectors after being picked by NZAAA’s own panel (a familiar story in those days). “You are so well trained and fit that it would be a shame to give up everything because of the decision of these men. You are young, and with Michael [Beable, her husband] you both love athletics and I think it would not be too hard to hold out another four years…”  Clearly, behind the front of the demanding coach, there was a kind man, and a lifelong lover of athletics.

Written by Roger Robinson. Stats from Barbara Beable.