Ledecka shines brightest thanks to Miracle on Snow
Czech adds snowboard gold to ski success on final day of a Games enlivened by efforts of the no-hopers
CHIEF SPORTS FEATURE WRITER
Ester Ledecka’s father, Janek, is one of the Czech Republic’s foremost composers, having once scripted a rock opera inspired by Hamlet. For his next artistic muse, he need look no further than the deeds of his own daughter, who yesterday became the first woman to win gold in two separate sports at the same Winter Games. If the Lake Placid Olympics of 1980 brought us the “Miracle on Ice”, when a US ice hockey team comprised solely of amateurs dethroned the mighty Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, then Pyeongchang 2018 produced, thanks to the polymath Ledecka, the Miracle on Snow.
Skiing and snowboarding are, as anybody who has dabbled in both would attest, fundamentally different. While skiers rely on their skis to navigate down the mountain, boarders use their bodies. Where bindings ensure the skier faces straight ahead, the boarder is strapped in sideways.
But Ledecka, 22, has melded the two disparate art forms to captivating effect. As one whose mother was a figure skater and whose grandfather won two Olympic medals in field hockey, she was always encouraged to find her own novel path in life. How emphatically she has succeeded, following up a shock gold in alpine super-G with another in parallel giant slalom, a feat for the ages.
“Ester is an incredible person, once in a lifetime,” said Justin Reiter, her American coach, after Ledecka cemented a place in Olympic folklore by vanquishing Germany’s Selina Joerg in the final slalom head-to-head. She appeared stunned, bashful even, at the magnitude of what she had achieved, but imparted a clear image to all young admirers that they should focus only on a single sport. “Just do what you want to do,” she smiled.
There could be no more fitting mantra for the Winter Olympics.
No earthly reason could explain, for example, why Mexico’s German Madrazo, a 43-year-old businessman who grew up with the sun on his back, decided to try his hand at crosscountry skiing. But when he finished last of a 116-man field in the 15km freestyle, he and fellow stragglers from those equally snow-denuded lands of Colombia and Portugal celebrated as if he had set a world record. Sometimes, just as Pierre de Coubertin intended, the most powerful gesture is to have a go.
Just ask Elizabeth Swaney, whose yearning to be an Olympian was so overwhelming that she entered the ski halfpipe event despite having failed to master a single trick. Of all the arresting sights in South Korea, few were as memorable as that of Swaney, a Californian representing Hungary, breezing through this explosive discipline as if tackling a green run in Aviemore. Never mind frontside 1440s, she could barely manage a safety jump.
Why was she even here? But why not? True, she exploited a loophole that allowed her to qualify so long as she amassed enough top-30 results at World Cup events where fields were rarely over 20. But she also funded her own travels in pursuit of a dream.
For the British delegation in Pyeongchang, the rationale has been more calculating. More than
£32 million has been spent on surmounting the country’s lack of alpine tradition for record success, and Dame Katherine Grainger, UK Sport’s chair, could make a case that the quest has been fulfilled. A haul of five medals, albeit four of them bronze, satisfies the target set. Any euphoria should be tempered, though. Lizzy Yarnold, Britain’s first back-to-back Olympic champion, is a wonderful ambassador for skeleton, but there is still nowhere in the land to try out the sport. Spending £6.4million of public money on each medal is wildly extravagant, especially when curling alone received the same sum and failed to reach the podium with either men’s or women’s quartets.
There needs to be a debate whether these sports deserve such lavish subsidy for Beijing 2022. And that even applies to speedskating, where Elise Christie, the outstanding medal prospect for Britain, became the team’s tearful fall-girl for the second Olympics running. She either crashed or had her result scrubbed in all three races but is adamant that she wants to correct the nightmare in four years’ time. However, given the mental scar tissue accumulated these past 16 days, one wonders if such intentions are sound.
The Pyeongchang Games, though, ought not to be defined by British funding rows or Christie’s lachrymose failures. They should instead be cherished in the memory for the topless Tongan flag-bearer who risked hypothermia, the Jamaican skeleton racer who had given up his role as a hyena in The Lion King and the unified Korean women hockey’s team who proved that sport, if only for a couple of weeks, could help bridge the divide of this polarised peninsula. Pyeongchang delivered sport of the most intense colour. And nobody shone brighter than Miss Ledecka.