This week, Ester Ledecká preferred the World Cup snowboard races to the speed skiing disciplines, because she wants to compete in both sports at the Winter Olympics. She needs to meet the nomination criteria so that she can defend both gold coins in Pyongyang 2018 in Beijing in February.
Collisions in alpine skiing and snowboarding are common in the winter calendar. Ledecká regularly decides what she is currently working on.
“I have been dealing with this dilemma all my life, so it does not surprise me. Now it has been decided that I would like to nominate for Chinese races in both sports, so I have to meet the nomination criteria,” she said.
While her ski rivals had two super-giant slaloms in St. Moritz over the weekend and a super-G in Val d’Isere awaits them this week, Ledecká traded her skis and moved from overseas to Italy.
On Thursday she will have a parallel giant slalom in Carezza, on Saturday she will complete the same discipline in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
She last competed on a snowboard a year ago when she won a giant slalom in Cortina. She was preparing for the March World Cup in the Slovenian Rogla resort, but gave up due to health problems. After overseas ski races, she experienced a quick transition to the board again.
“The winter season is terribly short and there are a lot of races I would like to ride, so I have to miss myself,” she said.
The transition is never easy for her. “It’s a completely different sport, so I always have to get used to all those new moves,” she explained.
He treats all races, whatever the sport, with the same determination. “For me, every competition is adrenaline and it doesn’t matter if I play balls or play beach volleyball. Snowboarding is great in that I can ride more rides during the day,” she looked forward to it.
The 26-year-old Czech Republic has won the World Cup four times in a row since 2016 in the evaluation of parallel snowboard disciplines. Then she started appearing more often among alpine skiers, she has only three starts in the World Cup on a snowboard in the last two seasons. In two of them she won, one was the other. Opponents do not solve.
“To be honest, I race with myself and I don’t care who stands next to me. I try to prove to myself that more than one sport can be done on a professional level. That’s my specialty,” she said.
The Snowboard World Cup in Alpine disciplines started this weekend in Banno, Russia. The giant slalom was won there by the home Sofija Nadyršinová, in the slalom the fastest was the Swiss Julie Zoggová. The current order of the series is led by the German Ramona Theresia Hofmeisterová.
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