The time when the UR were founded, the SK Rapid experienced rather hard times. Also the UR members were not too satisfied with the progress of their club. In search of new ideas, one drove to Italy where several Ultrа-groupings were already being around for years. They offered unbelievably fantastic choreographies and of course the UR Vienna wanted to follow suit. But it should take another 2 years until the first ideas became reality.
In 1990 we dared our first support by "sheets of paper" in a match versus Austria Vienna, our city rival. It was met with very good reactions - we had made ourselves a name and seemed to be on the right way.
By the way, Hoppers who would like to admire our choreographies should come and meet us at matches versus Austria Wien, Sturm Graz and Salzburg. In these games we are almost always succesful in realizing nice ideas. At Away Games we mostly use Bengal lights and other kinds of fireworks."
"In November of 1996 a bunch of young fans of „Rapid Wien“ decided to found an own fanclub. For quite a long time they debated about a proper name for the club, which they wanted to be something completely new. In the end they agreed on “Tornados Rapid Wien 1996”, and although this name has recently been copied by others several times, it originally was invented by us.
The next action was the production of a banner and from that time on we didn´t miss any match of our team. Nearly one year later we started the publishing of our fanzine “Tornados Spezial” which originally was just meant to be a newsletter, but quickly established itself in the public market of fanzines. Apart from that the next three years went by without much further development of our group.
In our fourth year our clubmembers became more active and started to use smoke and pyrotechnics, especially during away games. Thus we were able to strenghten our position within our home-block, “Block West” in “Hanappi Stadion”, although our activities can´t be compared to those organized by “Ultras Rapid”, still the most important fanclub in “Block West”. “Tornados Rapid” is a club without any political interests, whose simple but important target is to support our beloved “Rapid” in every match, at home and away.
During the winterbreak in the season of 2000/2001 we started the production of our own fanequipment (scarfs, caps, T-shirts, …), made a second banner and our first own flags and “Doppelhalter”. We increased our stock of these continually, and today we own a few hundreds of them. In the meantime a member of our club created our first logo, which was a head wearing sunglasses and a scarf in our colours. Although we identify with a new logo nowadays, a tornado, we still honour our first one.
In the season of 2002/2003 in autumn the membership of “Tornados Rapid” grew immensly, which of course steadied our position within the fanszene. Our increasing use of pyrotechnics during matches earned us a reputation of being “pyros”. The same season we started to organize bustransports to away games and for a couple of years now we´ve always had at least one “TR-Bus” for every match that didn´t take place in Vienna.
Our breakthrough took place in 2005. Again the number of our members increased rapidly and today our fanclub consists of about sixty people. Important to mention that we don´t admit everybody but restrict to people who are willing to put in hard work, which is absolutely necessary to guarantee for the quality of our activities."
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