Milena Foltýnová-Gschiessl

Czech-born Milena Foltýnová-Gschiessl played basketball and table tennis, and tried athletics in her youth. Then, at the age of 14, she started playing handball, firstly in Litvínov before a transfer to TJ Gottwaldov (today’s HC Zlín) in 1970. With them, she won the championship in the 1973/74 and 1976/77 seasons. Foltýnová-Gschiessl excelled as a scorer and in the Gottwaldov jersey scored more than 1,300 goals in ten years. In the four seasons from 1976/77 to 1979/80 Foltýnová-Gschiessl was the League´s top scorer. She was named the best handball player of the Czechoslovak Republic five times (1974-75, 1977-79). Foltýnová-Gschiessl played with the Czechoslovakian national team at the 1980 Moskva (Moscow) Summer Olympics and placed fifth.

Foltýnová-Gschiessl went to Austria in the early 1980s and became a member of the national handball team that participated in the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. The team finished sixth and last in the round-robin tournament. Domestically, Foltýnová-Gschiessl played in Austria with Hypobank Südstadt Wien (Vienna) and later for UHC Hollabrunn and WAT Fünfkirchen. Foltýnová-Gschiessl won 193 caps with Czechoslovakia and scored international 616 goals. Later she scored 476 more goals with the Austrian national team.