He reached his athletic peak at the 1990 European Athletics Indoor Championships, where he caused an upset by beating the much more favoured world record holder Ulf Timmermann with an Austrian indoor record of . This made him Austria's first European champion in the shot put and only the third Austrian man to win a gold medal at the indoor competition, after Andreas Berger and Dietmar Millonig. Outdoors, he consistently threw beyond nineteen metres that year, with highlights being fourth place at the Athletissima meet and a tenth-place finish at the 1990 European Athletics Championships.