Saturday, February 13, 2010

Meet Mexico's Olympic Team

The Gringo Olympic team is the largest in Vancouver: 216 athletes. The Mexican team: one athlete. A skier.
Mexico is not known for winter sports, but HSH Prince Hubertus zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg (who uses the name Hubertus von Hohenlohe) is the sole athlete on the Mexican team. He carried Mexico's flag into the stadium during the Opening Ceremonies.
Prince Hubertus is the younger son of the late Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and Princess Ira of Fürstenberg, who was only 15 at the time of the marriage. Hubertus was born in Mexico City on February 2, 1959, which means he celebrated his 51st birthday earlier this month.
He competed for Mexico in the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1994 games. Hubertus did not take part in the 2002 or 2006 Winter Games, and has not competed at the Olympic level in sixteen years, although Hubertus can hardly be described as a top-level skier.
Although he qualified for the 1996 Games, Mexico chose not to send a one person team to the games in Albertville, France. He has also taken part in 12 World Championships, although he has never won a medal in international competition.
Hubertus has Mexican and Austrian citizenship. He is also a businessman and a photographer, and he dabbles in pop music, where he uses the name Andy Himalaya.
In an interview with Time magazine, Prince Hubertus admitted that skiing for Mexico "sounds strange." His paternal grandmother was half-Mexican, and his father was running the Volkswagon plant in Mexico when Ira gave birth to Hubertus. "We always wanted to have one member of the family [who was] Mexican. So they chose that I was going to be born in Mexico. That was the idea."
(Prince Alfonso and Princess Ira were divorced in Mexico City in 1960, and their marriage was annulled nine years later.)
Prince Hubertus was four years old when he moved to Spain. He attended school in Austria, where he learned to ski. Because he was born in Mexico, he learned he could compete for that country, as he was not good enough to make the Austrian ski team..
The prince maintains a home in Cabo San Lucas, but he acknowledges spending just two or three weeks a year in Mexico. "I do feel Mexican. Naturally, I have more ties to Spain, but I'm more of a Latin person. Although our name is very German, and we're a German aristocratic family, we really grew up in a more of a Mediterranean way.
"In life you have a couple of opportunities and openings. And one of them was that I was born in Mexico. Sure, I used it to my favor. But not in an abusive way. You try to find that little thing that makes a difference, and take advantage of them. I took advantage of it."

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1963484_1963490_1963932,00.html

Hubertus' primary residence is in Liechtenstein. His older brother, Christoph, died in 2006 in a prison in Thailand after being arrested for forging a visa. He also has two younger half-sisters, Arriana, who is the wife of Denny Boardman, and Desiree, who lives and works in Brussels.
Prince Hubertus is not married.

So .. who's competing for Luxembourg? Did their team miss a flight to Vancouver, and the parade of nations?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No athletes from Luxembourg are competing this year. They have only competed in 7 Winter games. This is sad because Monaco, Liechtenstein and even Andorra have teams this year.

Eurohistory said...

Piedita de Iturbe, the mother of Alfonso Hohenlohe-Langenburg and grandmother of Hubertus, happened to be one of the richest heiresses. Her family owned vast acreage in Mexico's Northern provinces...landholdings so vast that they rivaled small German duchies and principalities. She is the foundation stone for the vast fortune enjoyed by her descendants. As if it were not enough, one of Piedita's grandsons, Marco zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, stands to inherit one of the three most prominent duchies in Spain, Medinaceli!