A thought that keeps popping into your head when you watch ski racer Marco Odermatt at work: This can’t go well. It certainly can’t be enough for the podium, said Andreas Sander recently, Germany’s second place in the downhill at the World Championships. Odermatt likes to drift off the ideal track, rowing his arms and upper body. And then, says Sander, “he saves himself somehow because he’s also technically capable”. Because Odermatt always presses his skis into the snow so that they pull him downhill quickly, because of his strength, his intuition. You just often don’t see it at first glance, because Odermatt makes what is difficult look so easy, as if it were just a game.
On Sunday, in the Olympic giant slalom in Yanqing, it snowed like it hasn’t snowed for a long time in a region where there is rarely a flake on the brown mountains. The race was almost over, half of the starters had been thrown off the course, including the German Alexander Schmid. The terrain was reminiscent of a difficult mogul slope. Only Odermatt was still at the start, five hours after setting the fastest time in the first run. “I had so much time to think about everything,” he said later and said: gamble everything away. And then he drove off, the lead melted away, the Slovenian Zan Kranjec had presented him with a magic ride. It couldn’t go well, and in the end it did.
There aren’t too many ski racers, even in ski crazy Switzerland, that carry the potential to rack up big wins like other autograph cards. Who smile from posters in the country that are fed by Austrian fizzy drinks companies, Swiss watch manufacturers and German car companies. Those who have already “risen to become winners, poster boys and presumably the best marketed Swiss snow athletes” are like them The New Zurich Times recently noted. What’s going to happen now that the ski racer Odermatt has chosen the gold plaque as his first Olympic medal, at the age of 24?
Odermatt has done a lot to protect itself from the risks and side effects of its industry
The ease with which this curly-haired blonde has stormed to the top sometimes belies how highly respected his career was raised, long ago. Father Walter trained his son at the Hergiswil ski club, where the senior was sports director for a long time. He drove his son to races and in the evenings he prepared his skis. He even built a kind of performance center around the Filius, from which other professionals later emerged. That says a lot about how big the hurdles are these days to get young ski racers into the sport. In any case, it paid off: At the Junior World Championships in 2018, Odermatt won five gold medals: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, team event. Nobody had done that before.
And while the burden of early successes pushed many a junior champion aside, Odermatt kept going.
In the overall World Cup he is already so far ahead that he can hardly be beaten: Marco Odermatt, Olympic champion 2022.
(Photo: Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
He has won ten races in the highly competitive World Cup so far, six in giant slalom, four in Super-G, and he has also finished second on the downhill – in Bormio and on the Streif in Kitzbühel. In the overall World Cup he is already so far ahead that he can hardly be beaten unless he gets injured – even if that is often only a matter of time in alpine sports, even for the best.
He has at least done a lot to be immune to the risks and side effects of his industry. Two years ago, when the pandemic was just beginning, he and a friend set up a weight room in an agricultural machinery hall. And while the competition travels to the competitions in private jets from private runways, he still trusts in the power of the collective. In the training group of the Swiss federation, they all made it to the top of the world: Odermatt, Justin Murisier, Gino Caviezel, Loic Meillard.
Marcel Hirscher said about Odermatt that he could win anything he wanted in the future
What sets him apart from the mania that many colleagues have, the constant need to outdo themselves: Odermatt drives the way he is: cheeky, witty, and not afraid of making mistakes. He once said that he had always kept his freedom beyond skiing, playing tennis or going on ski tours with his childhood friends. And, also unique, he has no problem saying what others often only think: that of course he wants to win victories and medals, nobody would believe anything else. Odermatt, the Austrian Marcel Hirscher, the retired super figure, once said a few years ago, could win anything he desires in the future.
And that’s how he drove on Sunday: it would be better to retire from the quest to win gold than to finish fourth. “In truth, I never dreamed of it,” he said of the Olympic victory. “And now it still feels like a dream.”
Can it just keep going like this?
Odermatt still makes a lot of mistakes, say those who know him, but that’s how it is: He only makes them once. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be the first tremendous talent to pay for his carelessness at some point, because at some point even the gifted can’t go any further in this sport. It was “so, so nice” to be in possession of this medal, Odermatt said on Sunday, as if he knew exactly how fragile this moment was: “You never know what’s going to happen next in skiing,” he said. “I’m glad I’m healthy and on the right track.”