Ledecka’s double gold improbable and amazing
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — When the book closes on these Olympics — all Olympics, really — Ester Ledecka will have her own chapter.
Though they’re both staged on snow, skiing and snowboarding are simply not supposed to mix. Though she could have been expected to win in one of those sports, nobody was supposed to do what Ledecka did.
The Czech Republic’s speed racer completed a feat considered all but impossible a mere week ago. She nabbed the second half of an unheard-of Winter Games double by winning gold in snowboarding’s parallel giant slalom Saturday, seven days after doing the same in skiing’s Alpine super-G.
Both sports have well-known stars who have shined brightly over the two weeks of action on the slopes in South Korea, but none have changed the conversation about what the Olympics can be in quite the manner as this soft-spoken 22-year-old from Prague, who insisted on wearing her goggles to the winner’s news conference, just as she did after her skiing win.
She was asked what the takeaway should be from her Olympic journey.
“Do whatever you want,” Ledecka said. “If you want to choose just one, choose one. I wanted to choose both, and a lot of people were telling me that it’s not possible to get on the top in both. And, I mean, obviously, this. It is not easy.”
She made it look easy on the last day of competition at the action park in an event usually considered an afterthought on the snowboarding program — but not this time.
This was no miracle on snow, which was the case for her .01-second victory in the super-G that left her stone-faced and unbelieving at the bottom of the hill, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake. Ledecka came into that event having started in only 19 World Cup skiing races in her entire career.
She came into Saturday’s event with 14 wins, 20 podium finishes and two world championships on the World Cup snowboarding tour. This was her day job, and she made it look that way with a wireto-wire exhibition of tight carving, perfect lines and pure domination.
Her snowboard coach, Justin Reiter, said Ledecka’s dual pursuit was about more than simply being a multi-sport athlete.
“It’s about having fun and getting back to the root of sports,” he said. “It’s about stopping looking at specialization of prima donnas at 8 years old.”
It’s one thing to be diverse, quite another to be this good in the most crushing crucible in sports. Much has been made about the similarities between skiing, which has been around for centuries, and snowboarding, still considered the brash younger brother of the snow park.
“But the thing is, it’s a different sport,” Reiter said. “It’s not like a different sport. It is a different sport. There’s a reason there’s no one doing it at this level. “
Reiter said the main struggle he and Ledecka’s ski coach, Tomas Bank, go through when they transition is getting Ledecka to stop making her turns so rounded after she’s been snowboarding and to stop pointing so straight downhill after she’s been skiing.
Her seven-day wait between races was more than just a technical challenge, though. The whirlwind after her improbable victory was hard to come down from.
“I had one week for it, and until today, I didn’t really feel good with my riding,” she said. “But today I found the snowboarder in me.”
Reiter, asked to put the magnitude of the achievement into perspective, said, “It’s impossible.”
“What happened here,” he said, “was once in a lifetime.”