Ledecka braces for Beijing 'friendly'

Shock champion of two different Winter Games sports is ditching pre-event pressure

PRAGUE:

Ester Ledecka, a shock champion in two different sports in Pyeongchang four years ago, refuses to even utter the word "Olympics" as she heads to the Beijing Winter Games.

Four years ago in Pyeongchang, the 26-year-old Czech won a surprise gold in the alpine skiing super-G event before adding another in her favoured event, the snowboarding parallel giant slalom.

It made her the first athlete to win events in both alpine skiing and snowboarding at the same Olympics.

In the super-G, Ledecka edged odds-on favourite Anna Veith of Austria by the narrowest of margins, with just one hundredth of a second separating the two.

Genuinely stunned, Ledecka did not even celebrate, staring at the scoreboard in disbelief for several seconds before a TV cameraman assured her she had won.

A week later, as hot favourite, she won the parallel giant slalom to make history.

She insists the Beijing Olympics are no more than "a little friendly match" – a term she and her team have adopted to ease the pre-event pressure.

If they utter the word "Olympics", they must pay a ten-euro ($11) fine.

"I took this precaution mainly because everyone starts behaving like a complete lunatic before 'the friendly'," she said.

"The media hype about Olympic races -- oops, there goes 10 euros – takes on massive proportions and everyone gets so crazy that they believe it might be something absolutely special even for me," she added.

"But it's just another race!"

While the tension is rising, Ledecka still loves what she does.

"I'm still the same, I just race down the hill and I still like it," Ledecka said at a recent news conference.

"But I hope I have learned something since 2018 and perhaps I am stronger and faster."

Ledecka, the daughter of a popular Czech singer and composer, took up skiing aged two and snowboarding at five as her family left Prague each winter for the Czech mountain resort of Spindleruv Mlyn.

She and her brother Jonas -- an artist who has designed her ski suit – even went to school there.

Snowboarding was Ledecka's first choice throughout her teenage years – "I made money for skiing as a snowboarder," she once said -- but the balance has recently changed