Czech snow queen Ester Ledecka, who completed a historic ski-snowboard double at the Winter Olympics, is aiming for more glory in both sports in the new season, calendar permitting.
Within a week in February, the 23-year-old “miracle on snow” created a sensation by winning the alpine skiing super-G gold and then, not so surprisingly, adding the snowboarding parallel giant slalom title at the Pyeongchang Olympic Games.
She is eyeing a repeat at next year’s world championships in both sports, but there is a catch as the events collide.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Snowboarders are to race at next year’s worlds in the US on Feb. 1 to 10, while skiers are to meet for the season’s peak in Sweden on Feb. 5 to 17.
“I would love to race at both events, but that’s all I can tell you right now,” Ledecka told reporters in her native city of Prague on Thursday.
Her coaches are in talks with snowboarding officials to adjust the order of the races to allow Ledecka to compete at both events.
“I still believe it will happen, but it’s probably just a naive survival instinct,” said Ledecka, the first woman to win gold medals in different sports at the same Winter Games.
“I guess I’ll have to decide,” she added, wearing a fur vest and a feather in her hair, her lucky charm from a Native American shop in Denver.
Her skiing coach, Tomas Bank, who expects Ledecka to prefer skiing to snowboarding in the end, said that he had led talks with the International Skiing Federation to have the snowboarding race a week earlier.
“But I’m not sure if it would be good. The Olympics showed us that when there’s a clash, it has its pros too,” he said.
“You simply practice for the single race that you want to do, and you don’t try to manage everything,” he added. “Ester is trying to strike a balance, but there’s just a bit more skiing for this season — it’s only that Ester doesn’t want to admit this.”
Ledecka has just returned from two-week snowboard training in Italy.
“I rode lots of kilometers,” she said before turning to Bank: “Hey, stop listening now!”
“We have fast boards. We tried new things with the technique... I hope I’ll be a bit faster next season again,” she added.
The two-time snowboarding world champion and three-time overall World Cup winner is ready to make a splash in the skiing World Cup, too.
So far, her best World Cup result is last season’s seventh place finish in the Lake Louise downhill.
However, Bank said that she had managed to beat her more famous rivals in super-G and downhill during a training trip to Chile in last month.
“One thing is to beat the other girls in training and another is beating them in a race, but it’s a good sign,” said Ledecka, the daughter of a popular singer and granddaughter of an ice hockey world champion.
“She will be well-prepared. I hope she will attack the top 10 in the first races at Lake Louise,” Bank said.
“That would be lovely, but I don’t like saying things in advance,” Ledecka said. “It all depends on how you sleep on race day.”
Ledecka, who has overcome “a marketing storm” following the Olympics, said her triumph has had an effect on fans’ expectations.
“Many people expect more than I’m able to achieve at this point of my career,” she said. “My second best result was the 17th spot in super-G and I’m aware that that’s the reality.”
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