Too good to be ordinary: Odermatt has already been confirmed as the overall World Cup winner before the crucial days of the season. He dominates the scene like Marcel Hirscher recently did – but what sets him apart from Hirscher and other greats?
You can hardly get more outspoken, nor can you have more freedom on skis: Marco Odermatt.
Anna Szilagyi / EPA
1056 points. Marco Odermatt will start the World Cup final in Saalbach this weekend with this lead. Four World Cup races are still to come in the next nine days, and the overall World Cup victory can no longer be taken away from the Nidwalden native. The second and third overall, Manuel Feller and Loïc Meillard, even together remain below Odermatt’s score.
Odermatt, a phenomenon.
To understand this phenomenon, it helps to read the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” from February 28th. It says that Odermatt’s father once founded “a kind of performance center around his son.”
No wonder Odermatt achieves such superlatives.
Odermatt, 26 years old, will be crowned overall winner for the third time in a row; only Gustav Thöni, Phil Mahre, Ingemar Stenmark and Marcel Hirscher have achieved three successes in a row before him. Odermatt will also win the discipline ranking in the giant slalom, possibly also in the downhill and super-G. So far this season he has taken part in twenty-three races and has been on the podium twenty times; In the remaining three races he was fourth, seventh, seventh. In the giant slalom he won nine out of nine races; In the final race on Saturday he strives for rare perfection, driving ten times, winning ten times.
There is no other choice than to explain this phenomenon by saying that Odermatt’s father once founded a kind of performance center around his son.
Like Miller or Hirscher? Rebelism was limited to two letters
Two years ago, the “NZZ am Sonntag” told father Walter Odermatt that he was one of the “drivers” in setting up the gifted program in Hergiswil: “Did you already have your son’s career in mind back then?” Odermatt’s answer: “Not at all, even though I sometimes hear that from envious people. I did this because of Reto Schmidiger and Andrea Ellenberger, who are a few years older than Marco. I saw their talent and wanted to help them on their path. Marco wasn’t even racing in animation back then.”
In 2005, Walter Odermatt and Reto Schmidiger’s father Paul launched this project to promote talented skiers, which offered performance-oriented young people training places from the seventh grade onwards. This year Marco celebrated his eighth birthday. The father does not hide the fact that he hoped that Marco would be as talented as Ellenberger and Schmidiger. But he didn’t launch this project to save a training place for his son from the seventh grade onwards. Marco was self-motivated and insisted on going out on the slopes with the older ones. Walter Odermatt said to him: “You have to be able to use the toilet yourself, then you can go to the ski club training.”
Despite envy, Walter Odermatt is widely acknowledged: He was committed to everyone and not to a special Sohnemann program. But Marco Odermatt has become too good and too big for his career and success to be explained conventionally.
Odermatt doesn’t have the outlaw story of Bode Miller, who grew up without electricity or running water. He also doesn’t offer the rising story of Hermann Maier, who people only noticed when he was already twenty-three and drove noticeably fast as the forerunner in a World Cup race. Odermatt and his father were never rebels like Marcel and his father Ferdinand Hirscher, who threatened the Austrian association with a change of nation to the Netherlands, his mother’s homeland.
Walter Odermatt, however, stopped having a say as soon as Marco had outgrown the regional talent support program and was a member of the Swiss Ski squad. The father once said that, firstly, Marco had the gift of taking positive things from every coach, and secondly, he always moved forward. When asked whether he would otherwise have interfered, Walter Odermatt said: “Yes.” His rebelliousness was limited to two letters.
It remained a hypothetical rebel yes. Because things always moved forward and Odermatt didn’t fight his way up through the family and private team like Lara Gut-Behrami or the siblings Janica and Ivica Kostelic. As Ivica Kostelic once said about life with his sister and father Ante: “The only hard thing for us was that we had no money. At that time we were really faced with a choice: either we buy a ski lift ticket for the next day or we sleep in a hotel. We needed the ski lift, so we couldn’t go to the hotel.” They spent the night outdoors, “only Janica was allowed to spend the night in the car. That sounds spectacular, but it was almost normal in our family.”
Marco Odermatt lets it rip, but always in such a way that he doesn’t lose, race or image
Spectacular, but almost normal: That’s what Marco Odermatt is talking about years later. And that’s how far it has come in top-class sport: that an ordinary career is no longer considered possible. Because therein lies the special feature that makes Odermatt a phenomenon: that he hardly used any special features. He rose through the usual association route, from a middle-class Swiss family with electricity and running water and no second homeland. Let’s put it this way: His extravagance was limited to the fact that he took his unicycle with him on his Sunday family walk and rode it through fields, forests and meadows.
He may be a lucky child who seems to have a lot of things falling into his lap: talent for movement, intelligence, popularity, decency. At the sports middle school in Engelberg he passed the third best Matura. When students played pranks together, it was Odermatt who the teachers didn’t catch. He knows how to win and celebrate, he lets it rip both ways, on the slopes and in the exit, but always in such a way that he doesn’t lose, race or image.
Odermatt doesn’t even know how to lose.
There are films in which he appears slightly tipsy, such as in February 2023 when he visited the SRF studio after winning the World Cup downhill title. This bottle would have to be opened gradually so that he could talk, said Odermatt, meaning a white wine. «Do you have a dry mouth? Or are you hypoglycemic?” asked the moderator. “Or over-alcoholic, who knows,” said Odermatt.
Toasting with the world champion: Marco Odermatt after the downhill gold in February 2023.
Youtube
In other cases, scientific papers would have been written about the seriousness of top athletes, who knows; Odermatts acknowledges this with a smile. The ski nation looks after him and forgives him. Probably also thanks to Odermatt’s openness, more frankness can hardly be achieved.
Or these days: an Instagram film of Justin Murisier, how he skis through snow-covered forests with Odermatt and Gino Caviezel, repeatedly passing trees and trees by a hair’s breadth. You can hardly get more freedom on skis. In this case too, Saubermann would probably be able to remind Odermatt of a role model function. But they give him that bit of freedom.
What is remarkable about Odermatt is how he is left to his own devices – that he is allowed to do whatever he wants; that hardly anyone moralizes and he doesn’t use up any energy trying to fight critics.
Odermatt learns from one day to the next, from goal to goal
And so he gets to live his life as a winner, with supposed approachability, with disguised ambition and perfectionism. Also unforgettable is how he marches through the village and the darkness after the award ceremony at the last Lauberhorn races, with children behind him who want an autograph – and Odermatt rejects the request in an appropriately friendly and clear manner and says: “I haven’t had lunch yet, you know. »
After the next race, Odermatt sat in the snow next to his competitor Aleksander Kilde in the early afternoon and ate lunch. Better organized, from one day to the next. Likewise: from one goal to the next. At the beginning of March he started the second run of the giant slalom in Aspen rashly, stayed in the race, corrected and accelerated and won this time too.
Maybe this is how he finds perfection: because he is willing to allow the imperfect.
Marcel Hirscher, his predecessor as World Cup dominator and overall winner from 2012 to 2019, was once asked by a TV station about his weaknesses. Hirscher thought about it for eleven seconds and said: “I have enough weaknesses, right, but I’m just thinking about which ones I want to say on TV.”
Odermatt doesn’t hesitate for a second and says he’s too drunk, who knows.
On the same occasion he said: “To be able to stand here now and somehow have my career complete – that’s incredible.” Overall World Cup winner, world champion, Olympic champion, sometimes in multiple versions, he achieved it earlier than Hirscher, who was 28 when his career was complete, thanks to Olympic gold in 2018, finally.
Hirscher has more overall World Cup victories than anyone else, Ingemar Stenmark has more World Cup victories than any other racing driver, Hermann Maier has a unique resurrection story because he won the overall World Cup again after a serious motorcycle accident. Alberto Tomba combined success and extravagance like no one else.
And what does Odermatt have? Still time.
Stenmark, Maier and Tomba, all of these names appeared in the February text of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, which raised the question of whether Odermatt was “perhaps the best racer in alpine history”. As if there could only be one. The name Hirscher was missing, which alone shows how arbitrary this gimmick is. There can’t be just one, the history of skiing is far too big for that.
But everyone has their message. Hirscher said in the NZZ in 2018: “Don’t you dare say the wrong word – in the end everything is completely thought out. It’s a shame because a lot of naturalness is lost in this way. But there’s no other way, because otherwise you won’t grow old in this shark tank.”
This is Odermatt’s message: that he dares to say the wrong word; that he doesn’t think he’s in a shark tank. He also found: “When it comes to sensitive topics like vaccination issues, you can really only do it wrong. You’re either a jerk to this one or to that one. It’s better to keep quiet.” But almost no one can cover socio-political aspects flawlessly. Odermatt gave ski racing lightness, he shows that even imperfection helps to be complete.
Yes, Odermatt still has time. Maybe even learn to lose. And the skiing nation of Switzerland is losing again. That she also forgives him if he doesn’t win.