Assistant professor Kuettel celebrates his 41st birthday

In mid-February 2011, Andreas Küttel in Einsiedeln announced his resignation and the move with the family to Denmark.

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Former world-class ski jumper Andreas Kuettel celebrates his 41st birthday today. Even after the end of his career in 2011, sport continued to be his main focus.

Birthdays are not Küttels thing, even if he enjoys being with family and friends. He has no special wishes. Rather, the mother deserves the congratulations, after all she was doing the job at the time, he says on the phone with a smile.

Küttel lives in southern Denmark. He emigrated to Scandinavia immediately after his career, since his wife Dorota received further training there as a rheumatologist. The jump from top-class sport to “normal” life without creating the familiar environment was a double challenge for Küttel. It helped that he received a vicariate as a sports teacher – he had studied sports science at the ETH Zurich from 1999 to 2005. So he quickly got to know the language and the Danish culture.

A doctoral degree in Denmark

However, it was clear to Kuettel that it is not a job for eternity, as he was used to getting the last five percent out as an athlete, which is not possible with students. That is why he started his doctoral studies at the Institute for Sport and Biomechanics at the University of South Denmark in October 2013, which he completed in early 2017 with a doctoral thesis, in which he examined how elite athletes in Switzerland, Denmark and Poland got training and work to be able to combine top sport and master the transition to professional life. Now he is passing on his knowledge among other things to students – as an assistant professor.

He doesn’t miss the competitive kick of ski jumping very much, he always leaves the comfort zone in his current life. However, during the summer holidays in Switzerland, he does not miss the opportunity to do a few jumps on the ski jump named after him in Einsiedeln. He also worked as an expert on Swiss television and has been an external consultant for Swiss ski jumpers since spring 2017. However, he does not think back to his numerous successes, he is someone who lives in the here and now. But clearly the 2009 World Cup title is still associated with emotions, said Kuettel.

The best feeling in ski jumping

Even more striking than the World Cup title is a moment when he had to wait 15 minutes for the start signal on the ski flying facility in Planica because of the wind. Ski flying is an enormous challenge. Küttel describes the emotional state as follows: “The incredible size of the hill is overwhelming. Just the idea of ​​jumping there needs a lot of strength, you have to hide a lot. It is a combination of the extremes of control and letting go. The pulse is enormously high throughout the day, and one also deals with the jumps at night. The acceleration during start-up is extreme, you feel an incredible force in the air. It’s the best feeling you can ever have in ski jumping. »

Such a long career as that of Simon Ammann was out of the question for Küttel, also because in December 2009 he became the father of a son with whom he wanted to spend time, which would have been less possible with his constant trips as a ski jumper. In this respect, he enjoyed the fact that his son did not go to school for a few weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. “This gave us more time for each other, for example we did yoga every morning,” says Kuettel. He also sees many positive things in the crisis, such as the current deceleration of society. So he asked himself the question: “Do you really have to go back to the old behavior afterwards?”

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