Vienna, Jan 24 (BUS): It’s as if Lindsay Vonn was inspired by Peekaboo Street when she met her idol as a 9-year-old at a signature autograph session: When he was 10, Marco Odermatt won a junior race and benefited from a prize Prestigious first place – a ski day with his great Swiss idol Didier Cochet.
“Didier was my one and only role model, I always looked up to him and cheered him on at every race and was emotionally attached to him,” Odermatt, a star alpine skiing who competed in the Beijing Olympics, said in a recent interview. “When he won I was the happiest kid and when he didn’t I cried sometimes at home.”
An Associated Press report that Udermatt has won the junior race three times, each resulting in a ski chance with Kochet, who holds the record with five wins on the slopes at the fearsome Streif Arena in Kitzbühel, Austria.
Fast forward dozens of years and Odermatt is still childish at 24, but he leads the World Cup overall standings and delivers on the promise we saw when he won five gold medals at the Junior World Championships in 2018.
He’s a legitimate threat with a medal in three events at next month’s Beijing Games: giant slalom, super G and downhill.
“A medal would definitely be the goal,” Udermatt said, acknowledging that his biggest goal of the season is to win the World Cup as a whole after finishing second behind Alexis Pintorault last year.
Odermatt has been absolutely dominant in giant slalom, winning four of the five World Cup races this season. He’s also won two Super Gs recently and finished second on the three toughest slopes: at Bormio, Italy; Wengen, Switzerland; and Kitsbuil.
With his down-to-earth personality and ancestry from the small canton of Nidwalden in central Switzerland, the blonde-haired Odermatt – his nickname “Odi” – is a quintessential Switzerland.
Away from ice skating, he enjoys attending Swiss wrestling festivals – a sort of medieval version of the sport contested over sawdust.
Unlike many elite skaters, Odermatt does not have a special team. It is entirely based on the Swiss team and even uses Swiss skates made by Stöckli, a relatively small manufacturer compared to the larger Austrian brands that sponsor most of the top racers.
Technically a giant slalom, Odermatt’s style of racing in speed events in super-G and downhill is somewhat unconventional.
Cochran-Siegle pointed to Odermatt’s Super-G win in Beaver Creek, Colorado, last month — when the Swiss rider was able to correct mid-air during the last jump and narrowly clear the last two gates — as an example of what makes him so talented.
“You need it as a super-class G-skater to skate to your limits and push that, and that’s how you do well,” said Cochran-Siegle, comparing him to greats like Hermann Maier and Bode Miller — two of Cuche’s contemporaries.
With a height of 6 feet (1.83 meters), Udermatt does not look like his idol. At 5-foot-8 (1.74 meters), Cochet was compact and more powerful.
“I didn’t try to ski like (Cochet). I just tried to ski,” Udermatt said. “It’s a completely different kind of skater. …I stayed on (my way) and tried to do the technique the way I do.”
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