Gold’s Gym owner Rainer Schaller Biography
Rainer Schaller is a successful businessman who was born in Germany on January 4, 1969. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the RSG Group, which is comprised of the fitness studios McFit, John Reed, and Gold’s Gym. As a result of the incident that occurred during the Love Parade in Duisburg in 2010, he became famous.
Early life
Rainer Schaller grew up in Schlüsselfeld, West Germany near Bamberg. Both of his parents and his grandfather had jobs in the local retail industry there. [1] Gerd Schaller, renowned conductor and expert on the music of Anton Bruckner, is his brother.
Business career
Retail
In Schlüsselfeld, Rainer Schaller was able to successfully complete his training to become a retail salesman. In addition to this, he went on to complete more training in order to become an expert in business and retail. When he was 22 years old, he bought his first Edeka supermarket, and then not long after that, he bought three more of them in his home region.
Fitness industry
In 1997, he made a career change and entered the fitness industry. Under the McFit name, he built his first studio in Würzburg, Germany. With this brand, he entered the market at a price that was lower than the competition. By the middle of 2006, McFit was running 62 fitness studios across Germany, which had a total of 400,000 members and employed 1,000 people on a permanent basis. McFit was recognized as the largest fitness studio operator in Europe in 2011, boasting more than one million members across its locations. Schaller increasingly broadened his firm in order to appeal to a wider range of customer demographics. [10] Vito Scavo was given the responsibility of overseeing Rainer Schaller’s holding company’s operational management in the year 2018. RSG Group is the new name of the holding company that formerly went by the name McFit Global Group. It is comprised of twelve different fitness chain businesses (including McFit, John Reed, High 5). In the year 2020, Schaller purchased Gold’s Gym, which at the time was going through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schaller’s conglomerate of businesses will have employed 41,000 people in 48 countries by the end of the year 2020, and will have managed 17 distinct brands and more than 1,000 studios.
Love Parade
Rainer Schaller assumed the role of managing director of Lopavent in 2006; the company was responsible for organizing the Love Parade up until 2010. The event was planned with the intention of using it to promote McFit’s studios. Under Schaller’s guidance, the Love Parade was successful for a period of three years without a single incident. However, in 2010, he faced criticism for the tragedy that occurred at the Love Parade in Duisburg, which resulted in the deaths of 21 people and injuries to 652 others. In 2018, Schaller participated in the judicial procedures about the accident as a witness. He recognized moral responsibility for the incident, although he was not charged.
Disappearance
On October 21, 2022, a Piaggio P.180 Avanti plane carrying Schaller, his partner Christine Schikorsky, and their children vanished while flying from Palenque, Mexico to Limón, Costa Rica. The jet was on its way to Limón from Palenque. The next day, authorities in Costa Rica stated that wreckage had been recovered between 28 and 33 kilometers (between 17 and 20 miles) from Limón. However, they have not established what happened to the plane or its passengers.
After some time had passed, Jorge Torres, the Minister of Public Safety for Costa Rica, made the announcement that two bodies as well as parts of the aircraft had been discovered, but the remains had not yet been recognized.
