Our World Championship heroine

Venier’s gold trick before the gold run

Stephanie Venier

(Bild: Pail Sepp/Kronen Zeitung)

After a sleepless night due to nervousness, Stephanie Venier relaxed just in time. "Some of them were skiing in, I wobbled down through the crowd on my giant slalom skis, watched a bit of the men's training and recited the World Championships feeling." This was followed by a nap as a trick before the start of the World Championship Super-G in Saalbach and the spontaneous saying after waking up: "The sleep was worth its weight in gold." And the gold run followed ...

She simply felt good, which was the key to her success, as were the fast skis. She and her new service man Simon Vicenzi make a great team, said Venier. "We harmonize perfectly. We trust each other one hundred percent." She was not the favorite and had put herself under enormous pressure in the run-up to the race. "You have to force it in a certain way, but not with all your might. I knew that I could do it, that I had what it takes."

(Bild: Pail Sepp/Kronen Zeitung)

Career as a wave valley
In her review of the time between the downhill silver medal in St. Moritz in 2017 and the gold in the super-G eight years later, Venier also mentioned that this was the first World Championships where she was seeded in both speed races and had no pressure to qualify on site. That was good for her mentally and she was able to try out a few things in training.

The fact that she narrowly missed out on bronze in the 2019 downhill in Are ("pretty uncool"), as well as the difficult coronavirus period and traveling without family and friends ("really uncool"), is still fresh in her mind. Her entire career was a wave trough, but it didn't do her any harm. "It has made me a stronger person. I'm proud of myself, I fought, I stuck with it, it paid off." Compared to 2017, she has grown up and dares to try things out with the material.

"That's what counts" 
And the realization that skiing is not everything has also matured. "When you're skiing badly, skiing is everything. You don't need to talk about it. But that's why the world keeps turning. That's a bit trite to say, but we're healthy, we have a family at home, we're doing well, we have food and a roof over our heads. That's what counts." She addressed the falls and injuries suffered by her team-mates, saying that they had seen how quickly it could be over and that they were on a knife-edge in this high-risk sport.