André Maletz

André Maletz joined the Cologne Youth Park as a trainee in 1980 after completing his studies. He ran music workshops and gave drum lessons, worked in the adjoining café and was delighted to see the first Commodore C-64 computers slowly arriving so that he could run workshops and gaming sessions with visitors to the youth park. BMX was not yet an issue at the time; it only began in 1982 when Peter Beu, the manager of the centre, offered to build the first ramps for the Cologne BMXers on the large open space of the youth park. André's interest was limited, he was too busy with his musical endeavours. Things only became interesting for him in 1985, when Peter and André jointly organised the first freestyle contest in the youth park.

André enjoyed the free structures, the informal competition and the intensive collaboration with the young riders and took on the operational tasks relating to BMX and the organisation of the events. He regularly loaded the youth park's 9-seater bus with lively youngsters and set off with a quarter pipe on the trailer to competitions in Braunschweig, Hemsbach or Kenn near Trier. In addition to the not always easy task of looking after the drivers, he also helped organise the competitions on site, acted as spokesman and organised the judges.

The young sport had hardly any structures in Germany at the time. The competition formats were improvised on site or somehow rhymed together from photos in American magazines. The judges sometimes knew nothing about their luck until five minutes before the start of the competition, but this was also a major attraction of the events. The attempts to bring BMX freestyle into a more organised form were short-lived. The "GFA" (German Freestyle Association), for example, was an attempt by roller hockey coach Freddy Schneider, who had learnt about BMX in the youth park, to make freestyle official. He organised a three-day training camp in the Eifel and the first competitions. However, just like four years earlier, when the Jugendpark organised its first improvised BMX race without being part of the existing BDR structures, Schneider's plans were too restrictive and not "freestyle" enough for the riders and André. Independence has always been a top priority here.

The organisers of BMX freestyle competitions in the mid-1980s, such as the GFA and the "BMX Club Deutschland" from Hannover, which organised competitions and training camps like the GFA, were no more by 1987. The last attempt to found a kind of umbrella organisation for the German freestyle scene was the "DFO" (German Freestyle Organisation), a free association of a few organisers, which was mainly founded for the implementation of the first BMX Freestyle World Championships in Germany in Kenn in 1990. André was critical of the whole thing and history proved him right. The DFO fizzled out and what remained were one or two contests a year in Cologne's Jugendpark, sometimes with no more than 50 participants. A close-knit community that Lars Dorsch, a participant in the very first contest who is still part of the "bmxcologne" organisation team today, describes as a kind of "secret society". The riders of the youth park took on more and more tasks in the organisation of the competitions, which almost single-handedly ensured the survival of organised BMX freestyle in Germany until the revival of the sport around 1995.

In 2004, Stephan Prantl and Peter Beu from the Jugendpark called for help to take over the organisation of the World Championships in the Jugendpark. It was now the fifth World Championships that the Cologne team had organised and André joined the team as a consultant and accountant in the back office. As a long-standing confidant of the Jugendpark, he was given the power of the keys and thus the task of spending the nights in the Jugendpark building during the events - which did not always go off without a visit from the police.

The Cologne Jugendpark is known as the cradle of German BMX freestyle and André Maletz was an integral part of its development from the very beginning. His desire for freedom and commitment to the riders has shaped the spirit of "BMX Cologne", which to this day defies strict schedules and the dictates of inflexible live broadcasts and celebrates the "free" in freestyle. For his contribution to BMX freestyle in Germany, André was inducted into the German BMX Hall of Fame in 2025.