Alpine skiing: The nervousness of Austria’s ski scene before Kitzbühel – Sport

After all, one of them is in top form: Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Thal in Styria, nickname “Styrian Oak”, later made a career in Hollywood and American politics (which are not always easy to tell apart) – he’s back on the way to the Hahnenkamm races at the weekend in Kitzbuehel. And of course the reporters here are meticulous about that. Schwarzenegger, according to well-informed circles, checked in at his regular hotel, the Stanglwirt, “already on Wednesday”.. On Friday he will attend the white sausage party there, where he has been a regular for years. And the descents on Friday and Saturday, as well as the slalom on Sunday, Schwarzenegger will probably treat himself to, although the reporters didn’t want to be that specific.

It’s the old wave of excess that sloshes at you when you come to Kitzbühel these days. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the restrictions have also been lifted here, and 85,000 viewers have announced themselves for the weekend. Only the results of the local athletes did not quite match this anticipation, only for the men: Vincent Kriechmayr won a downhill run in Gröden and Bormio, plus seven podium places, including two by Matthias Mayer, the most memorable action of an Austrian in this so far winter provided: when he inspected the slope in Bormio, he decided to end his career, just like that.

So the ski nation is once again latently nervous, just before Kitzbühel, the race of the year, the most famous in the world, at least that. In hardly any other season do the Austrians celebrate their existence as a ski nation so unabashedly, but when they fail, it quickly turns into the next Direction: Rarely do they disassemble themselves so beautifully.

Ortlieb denies ever having said that about the mess

The impetus was an interview that Patrick Ortlieb had given to the Servus TV station. Ortlieb was Olympic champion in 1992 and world champion in 1996 in downhill skiing. In the meantime, he has made it to Vice President of the Austrian Ski Association (ÖSV), with a focus on finances. So someone from the red-white-red chamber of the heart, who now made a speech that Rudi Völler couldn’t have done better in wheat beer cheese shitty form. “It’s almost embarrassing how big an entourage we’re traveling with,” Ortlieb rumbled. “We’re dedicated to top-level sport and not fair-weather sport,” and in general: “It seems as if the athletes are too spoiled.”

It was no less entertaining when Ortlieb started talking about his employer. It was “almost shameful what we took over and are now trying to rebuild,” said Ortlieb. He said: from Peter Schröcks Nadel, ÖSV President for 31 years, core competencies: bring a lot of money into the alpine business – and, with his own winter empire, shovel out a lot of money again. At some point, Ortlieb dropped the word “pig” when he spoke of his predecessors, which was slowly becoming tantamount to blasphemy. Ortlieb quickly denied ever having said that about the mess.

The other side was shaken up one way or another. “I once wanted him to be my successor,” said Schröcks Nadel small newspaper, but Ortlieb “apparently can’t do it”. He, Schröcks Nadel, had read that Ortlieb had to help out in the kitchen at his family’s hotel. How should “someone who doesn’t have their own business under control lead the association?” The best thing, Schröcks Nadel decided, would be “if Patrick Ortlieb stayed in the kitchen and resigned from all his functions in the association”.

A former member blasphemes that the Austrian conditioning program comes from the “Stone Age”

Of course, many of those involved did not like that. Neither Ortlieb, who described the ÖSV as a “meanwhile democratically managed association”, nor the “cooking and tourism circles”, who did not like the “kitchen-sayer” of the former association head at all, like him courier reported. After all, Ortlieb’s daughter Nina, who is now an experienced downhill skier herself, took the edge off the impending state crisis when she revealed where she was helping out in her parents’ hotel: “Always happy, but mostly it’s the accounting.”

So have them, like that courier reported with relish, i.e. cooked a “little scandal soup” that they have been spooning out for weeks. Hans Knauß, who once made a career as a ski racer and later as a camera driver who skied down the slopes before the races (“Better a pimply-hard Gran Risa than a soft-boiled breakfast egg!”), blasphemed, the fitness program in the ÖSV comes from the “Stone Age”. Hannes Reichelt, who complained when he was active when former drivers “hit us in some newspapers”, now hit it himself in the Crown – which of course is not just any newspaper, but Austria’s big tabloid and ÖSV sponsor: Many trainers in the ÖSV only looked at the top runners, behind them, according to Reichelt, was the “deluge”.

Felix Neureuther attested to the neighbors most recently in an SZ interview that they tried too hard to promote individual runners as early as possible; I forgot that the Austrians always strengthened themselves collectively. Even more criticism rained down on the ski racers, who in turn complained that the many coach changes had provoked a lot of unrest. In the end, the accounted for Viennese newspaperOrtlieb is right about what he never claims to have said: “The ÖSV gives the picture of a mess.”

What if things are up and running again on the Streif? Then a lot of what was doesn’t matter anyway.