The ski racer had donned the nicest work clothes, a black and red sweater, a cap with the sponsors’ logos, and he was beaming as he was before the presents were presented. “I’m really satisfied, the hard work has paid off, as has the patience,” said Thomas Dreßen in a media round on Thursday evening.
Germany’s most famous ski racer of the present time unfortunately didn’t talk about the races in Val Gardena, the Super-G on Friday and the downhill on Saturday, but about his excursion to cross-country skiing. He had slipped on thin boards for an hour the day before, it was his first contact with the snow after Dreßen had an operation on his right knee after the World Cup last February. Again and again that knee that he had battered in a bad fall three years ago, that darn right knee.
And now, after the first pleasure, Dreßen unwrapped another message that resembled a Christmas present that one had not hoped for, but had expected for a long time. Anyone who could only run for an hour in December, he said, could not throw themselves on the breakneck ice slopes in Wengen and Kitzbühel in January. So of course he couldn’t submit the approval for the Winter Games in February, once in the top eight or twice in the top 15. His competition season, he contrite admittedly, had come to an end before it had started.
None of this came as a surprise, it had been emerging for weeks. The work assignment for the rest of the workforce in the German Ski Association (DSV) is not exactly easier. The downhill skiers now have to get by for another long winter without the only driver who can get on the podium in every race if he is in top form. Last winter, the colleagues catapulted their way forward out of the slipstream of the best, Andreas Sander and Romed Baumann each won silver at the World Cup. But the ability of the insider tips in the DSV is no longer that secret, and your own expectations have not decreased either. And staying up there is different from getting up anyway. On Friday, Josef Ferstl in Val Gardena was somewhat surprisingly the best of the DSV, in eleventh place.
Not yet fit enough: Thomas Dreßen, here during training with the former cross-country skier Axel Teichmann, can currently only glide on the narrower skis.
(Photo: Gerhard König / Imago)
The “bang”, the German head coach Christian Schwaiger admitted on site, is still a long time coming this winter for his ambitious speed selection. However, Schwaiger does not give the impression that he will soon light a candle in the pastel yellow parish church that watches over the Saslong slope in Santa Cristina. Besides Dreßen, there are no drivers in the portfolio with the talent of Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who won the Super-G on Friday, his third win in a row.
Since Schwaiger switched to the DSV men in 2014, initially as a trainer for downhill and super-G, his selection had made a lot of attempts before every success. In the past few years, “in the background”, almost everything has been exhausted, says Schwaiger; in the technology center of the DSV in Berchtesgaden, for which they hired the American Chris Krause three years ago, who once prepared Bode Miller and Didier Cuche’s skis.
Since then, Krause and his employees have been optimizing the suits, they are optimizing the undersuits, they are fine-tuning the finish surface of the skis, and for two years they have even been measuring their athletes’ journeys using GPS in order to determine the fastest lane even more precisely. In this arms race, says the head coach, they have now caught up with the market leaders, Switzerland and Austria. But that is also essential, as snuggly and tight as the tip is pulled together.
Above all, it is the athletes who have to lift the last of their strengths from their reservoirs. Sander, fourth in the Super-G at Beaver Creek, most recently the closest to the first bang, continues to work on the “battle line”. The 32-year-old has always carved through the corners with technical merit, on what was supposed to be the ideal lane. But if you are technically smart, you are not always fast, because the fastest often carry a little of this track. This trust, “to drive the somewhat bolder line” and to keep calm, is more and more common, said Sander, but not yet as reliable as the best. On Friday he fell back to 18th place.
Dreßen probably doesn’t have much more comeback attempts than this one
Baumann, on the other hand, who finished sixth in Lake Louise’s best DSV downhill run of the winter, will concentrate on consolidating what he has in the autumn of his career. “If I should win a race, it wouldn’t be in the technical section,” he said in Val Gardena. “I have other qualities,” such as sneaking through the sliding passages, which doesn’t look fast, but is often fast. In the Super-G on Friday, however, that did not help much because the 35-year-old screwed up the technically tricky exit of the Ciaslat meadow – 20th place.
And Josef Ferstl, who stated after two winters full of setbacks on Friday, after the little ray of hope that he had recently learned to trust his own opinion again: “I was often influenced by others in the last season,” he said , “I’ve given up my brain.”
Because the only 25-year-old Simon Jocher equaled his best World Cup result in fifteenth on Friday, because Dominik Schwaiger was already eleventh on the downhill in Beaver Creek, the head coach can continue to be calm with someone like Dreßen. “Tom is the future,” says Christian Schwaiger, as if the 28-year-old was a talent that will be carefully guided with a view to the coming winters. Dreßen probably doesn’t have much more to offer than this comeback attempt, the procedure of restoring the damaged cartilage is too demanding for that. And a descent, say insiders, is pretty much the worst thing you can do to such a badly marked knee.
Dreßen, however, did not show any doubts on Thursday, he confirmed that he had no choice: cross-country skiing was not for him in the long run.