Founder of Europe's largest fitness operator McFit: Who is Rainer Schaller; How did his plane disappear?
It has been announced that the plane carrying German fitness entrepreneur Rainer Schaller and his family disappeared off the coast of Costa Rica. The plane carrying Rainer Schaller disappeared after taking off from Mexico.
Rainer Schaller was born on January 4, 1969, in Germany. McFit is the Founding CEO of the RSG Group, which includes the John Reed and Gold's Gym fitness studios.
ABOUT SCHALLER
Schaller founded the fitness chain McFit in 1996. The sports giant currently has more than 250 branches and 1.4 million members in Europe.
Career steps
Rainer Schaller worked as a retail specialist in Schlüsselfeld. At the age of 22, he took over the first Edeka supermarket and soon three supermarkets in his area. In 1996, he moved to the fitness industry and opened his first studio in Würzburg, Germany, under the McFit brand. By mid-2006, McFit was operating 62 fitness studios in Germany with a total of 400,000 members and 1,000 permanent employees. In 2011, McFit was recognized as Europe's largest fitness studio operator with over 1 million members. In 2020, Schaller acquired Gold's Gym, which went bankrupt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2006 Rainer Schaller became managing director of Lopavent, which organized the Love Parade until 2010. The goal was to use the event to promote McFit's studios. The Love Parade continued uneventfully for three years under Schaller. But in 2010, a stampede occurred at the Love Parade in Duisburg, which left 21 people dead and 652 injured.
WHAT IS THE "LOVE PARADE" DISEASE?
The event was held in an old train station. And the capacity of this area was at a level that could hold up to 500,000 people, and considering the past years, it was estimated that close to 1 million viewers would come.
Check-in started at 14:00; The entrance and exit point was determined as a tunnel with a length of only 200 to 300 meters.
As the festival area became overcrowded, an unknown panic occurred during the entrance to the tunnel and 21 people lost their lives.
THE AIRCRAFT IS LOST
On October 21, 2022, the plane carrying Schaller, his lover Christine Schikorsky, and their children disappeared en route from Palenque, Mexico, to Limón, Costa Rica. The next day, Costa Rican officials reported that the wreckage was found 28-33km from Limón, but there was no word on the fate of the plane or its passengers.
During the search operation, the personal belongings and luggage of the passengers were found. According to AFP's report, the dead bodies of two people, one of them a child, were found together with the luggage.