Ester Ledecká

“I tried and gave it everything I have. Even though everybody kept telling me it was not possible.”

Ester Ledecká interview: Czech winter sports legend Ester Ledecká is the only person in history to have won Olympic gold medals on two different pieces of equipment. In this interview she talks to us about the Ester Ledecká Snowboard and Ski story and we try to crack the code of her unprecedented success.

ester ledecká

“I tried and gave it everything I have. Even though everybody kept telling me it was not possible.”

Ester Ledecká interview: Czech winter sports legend Ester Ledecká is the only person in history to have won Olympic gold medals on two different pieces of equipment. In this interview she talks to us about the Ester Ledecká Snowboard and Ski story and we try to crack the code of her unprecedented success.

“I wanted to make it so much that I didn’t think about any other possibility.”

By Paul McGee, Head Feature Writer. July 27 2019

In some ways there is only virgin territory ahead of Ester Ledecká.

The ground that stretches so promisingly before her is uncharted. Because no one has achieved what she has.

“Everybody kept telling me it was not possible,” Ester tells me. “Well, I really don’t blame anyone – they had a point in some ways.”

I have approached the subject of Ester Ledecká’s exceptional achievements on snow. I’d like to understand how she has reached such pinnacles of success across two different disciplines, and I feel like there’s a lot to learn from this winter sports trail blazer.

Multi-tasking: it’s an alien concept to me. I can’t cook the dinner and make a phone call at the same time – even on hands-free. I can ski and I can snowboard but while I’m comfortable all over the mountain on two planks, my snowboarding skills are intermediate. At best.

Alright, so that’s just me. Plenty of winter sports junkies can step nimbly from skis to board with perfect adroitness (she might not admit to it, but half pipe snowboard legend Torah Bright is actually pretty handy on skis too).

There is an abundance the world over of multi-discipline athletes who are competent across the full spectrum of their sports. Those who reign supreme, however, are a rarer breed.

If it’s true that variety is the spice of life, then Ester Ledecká is jalapeno-hot.

Make no mistake, this Czech Olympic Champion has taken the concept of versatility and ridden it into the stratosphere of the winter sports empyrean. When Ester won gold at Pyeongchang 2018 not just in two separate events, but across two entirely separate disciplines, on two entirely different pieces of equipment – well, to say that she turned a few heads is an understatement of monolithic proportions. Hers is an accomplishment no one else has attained. Ever.

In fact Ester Ledecká is the epitome of over-achievement. Quite how she pulled off that Olympic feat, winning gold at Super G in alpine skiing and then seven days later, gold at Parallel Giant Slalom in alpine snowboarding, is something most onlookers – not to mention many of her fellow athletes – have marveled at. Such discipline diversity, I’ve decided, is worth investigating. The Ester Ledecká code is one I’m going to crack.

And the first clue, it seems, lies in her compulsion to keep moving. Ester Ledecká is not one to lounge by the pool, even on holiday.

“I had some rest during the past week,” she says. “I came to Greece and I was enjoying myself. I was windsurfing, wakeboarding, water skiing. Now I’ve started my conditioning training so I added some running, jumping and other workouts.”

The water sports Ester talks of are athletic ones, the kind that leave the uninitiated wobbling at the knees and unable to raise their arms (what do you mean that sounds like the voice of experience?) Ester Ledecká calls them ‘rest’ – you heard that too right?

As well as the twin gold medals at Pyeongchang, Ester Ledecká has won two alpine snowboard golds and a silver at the 2015 and 2017 FIS World Championships. In other words she isn’t a one-hit-wonder who got lucky at the Olympics. But to really delve into the recipe of her achievements, we must go back to the beginning.

“Well I started with skis when I was two or three years old,” she says. “I was following what my brother did. He is one and a half years older than me and so when he started with a board, I wanted to do it too. I was five years old when I started with snowboarding and I did freestyle snowboarding and boardercross until I was about thirteen years old. And again it was my brother who started with alpine snowboarding and I wanted to beat him, so I learned that too. To be honest my first steps on a snowboard and also then later on an alpine board were really difficult for me and I didn’t like it in the beginning. But as I said I was very competitive and I wanted to get better at these sports. I believed that once I got into it I would love it – and I was right!”

So we have the first clues pointing towards Ester’s future successes, and they centre around that age-old value of competition. But surely a desire to beat your older sibling doesn’t equate to double Olympic gold.

History has delivered us some great skiers and some great snowboarders, a handful of whom we can truly call legends of their respective sports. Somehow Ester Ledecká has taken that notion a step further and beaten the best on both skis and snowboard. At the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics she finished ahead of Anna Veith, no less, to take Super G gold, and overcame alpine snowboard bastions Selina Jörg and Ramona Hofmeister en route to PGS gold. Which is unprecedented (at least, it is at the same Winter Olympics on two entirely different pieces of hardware – Russian Anfisa Reztsova won gold in Cross Country Skiing at the 1988 Calgary Games and then took Biathlon gold at the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Games). So I’m compelled to investigate further, to ask a question which I think might just be impossible to answer: How?

“That’s not so difficult a question. I simply tried that. I tried and gave it everything I have. Even though everybody kept telling me it was not possible. Well, I really don’t blame anyone – they had a point in some ways, but I believed that I would make it. And my family believed in me. This was the most important thing. I wanted to make it so much, that I didn’t think about any other possibility. There are still a lot of goals in front of me and I still feel that, after all these years, I have the flame burning inside of me. I’m still enjoying my life the way it is, even through all this hard work the life of the professional athlete brings.”

So to the recipe of success we must add self-belief. Ester’s fortitude comes from within, that much is evident. But those pioneering achievements are not solely down to her inner convictions, nor to that competitive nature developed all those years ago against her older brother. Ester Ledecká built her own foundations, yes, but there is a supporting framework that buttresses the core: even an athlete of Ester’s monumental capacities needs a helping hand.

“I’m proud that I have a great relationship with my family, because this is not so common in the present time around me. I’m proud that I can afford to pay all those great people in my team because that was also an important part of my dream – that I would have enough money to pay my physio, tech guy, coach, and all of those expenses connected with my training and racing activities.”

Actually it’s coaches, plural, because not surprisingly Ester has more than just one. Her skiing coaches are brothers Tomáš and Ondřej Bank. Ondřej is a two-time 3rd place finisher in the World Cup and finished fifth in the Giant Slalom at Sochi, making him the most successful alpine skier to emerge from the Czech Republic.

Guiding Ester to snowboard supremacy are Italian Erich Pramsohler, and Justin Reiter from the USA, who in 2013 took Parallel Slalom silver at the FIS World Championships in Stoneham, Quebec. Then there is the head of her snowboard team, Sigi Grabner, who won bronze at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games and gold at the 2003 Parallel Giant Slalom World Championships. (Sigi is also the founder of SG Snowboards, on whose boards Ester races). Alongside serviceman Petr Kouřil and physiotherapist Jakub Marek, Ester’s mother Zuzana takes overall responsibility for her training and competition schedule.

Quite the supporting cast isn’t it?

It is a litany of ski and snowboard talent that’s as necessary as it is prestigious. The professional winter sports athlete lives a busy life. Even the summer months are chock-full of conditioning and physio, fine tuning equipment and techniques. But the winter brings a relentless competition schedule, plucking an athlete from their home nation and delivering them to the far-flung mountain ranges of the world. It is an enervating trail of airports and oversized baggage, jet lag and yes, racing against the best in the world. And that is a pattern followed by those athletes who pursue just the one discipline.

While Ester and her team can put together some kind of pre-season plan, with a box here for skiing, a box there for snowboarding, one schedule clash in the racing calendar can throw the whole design out the window. As a result, Ester’s race season can be somewhat of a rollercoaster. As evinced by her decision at the end of the 18-19 season when on January 17th she made up her mind to compete at the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Åre, Sweden instead of the Freestyle Ski and Snowboarding World Championships in Utah. Both kicked off at the start of February.

“Usually we plan to make sort of training blocks. Always some days on skis and some days on snowboard. But that is just the plan A. And through plans B, C…we are somewhere in plan X in the middle of the season. Because we have to arrange our plans according to the weather and the permanently changing race schedule, and that is already kind of a rodeo. It is a lot about the communication between my coaches and my mum the head coach who are all luckily in the very good relationship.”

Because Ester Ledecká’s team can register some of her entries with the FIS just a day or two prior to the events in question, the decision on whether to race on one plank or two can be a very last minute one. Hence the unpredictable nature of her season. Actually, rodeo sums it up very well.

The Ester Ledecká puzzle is growing clearer. Under inspection I feel like I’ve identified some of the necessary – alright, vital – components to her success: determination, self-belief, an insuperable competitive urge; and now we can add the element of teamwork, the nuts and bolts of Ester’s athletic vehicle.

There is more than just the people element though. Every winter sports athlete must be at one with their equipment. That goes for skaters, sliders, all the skiing and snowboarding disciplines too. For Ester Ledecká that means two suppliers. As I said, for snowboarding she races on equipment made by the Austrian boutique fabricator SG, who also supply boards to Pierre Vaultier, Andrey Sobolev, Dmitry Loginov and a host of other Olympic, World Cup and World Championship medallists. Actually I’ve got a lot to say about SG and their values, but I’m hoping to catch up with Sigi himself in the near future so let’s put that one hold for now.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from a commercial sense perhaps, is Atomic. A subsidiary of the massive Amer Sports Group, Atomic manufactures some 600,000 pairs of skis every year. If you’ve been anywhere near a winter resort in your life, you’ll have seen someone with their Atomic boots clipped to their Atomic skis. And of course, their equipment is used by some of the greatest skiers in the world. Alongside Ester Ledecká, Mikaela Shiffrin, Sofia Goggia and Marcel Hirscher are but a handful of the names on the Atomic roster.

For two sports equipment entities so different on the surface, Ester has found some common ground.

“Actually,” she says, “the most important points are similar for both – top quality and an individual approach to athletes. I’m very honored that such a top factories have chosen me as a factory rider. The professional equipment makes a big difference in the final result. It is great that top professionals have my back!”

If you’re an aspiring winter sports athlete, you’re probably thinking: Great, I had all the boxes ticked, right up to the part where she gets the multiple sponsorship deals.

You know what, don’t worry about that.

There is an expression that goes something like: If you build it, they will come. Taken literally it’s an erroneous mantra because let’s face it, how many new shops, restaurants and online entities pop up and then collapse within the first year of trading? They built them, and no one came.

But taken as a metaphor for the character – now there is a saying that rings true.

Yes, if you’re going to compete at the elite level of any sport, you’re going to need someone who provides the necessary equipment. But it isn’t a sine qua non to success. Not in the beginning. The more Ester reveals to me, the more I realise that attitude is the vital ingredient. At the start, and throughout a successful career. The Ester Ledecká mindset is like a magnet for the other components of success. In fact her very definition of success isn’t measured in medals and trophies, but something much more fundamental and profound. It is measured in approach, not results.

“I think success is everything that you have reached with passion,” Ester tells me. “It doesn’t have to be a big thing. You can decide that you will learn a new language or walk on the slackline, or make an awesome dinner for your friends. Only when you invest your time to reach this goal, you will give it a chance and you will try it over and over again until you will make it. Then the success for me is not only the result but it is the way how to get there and the first decision to get out from your comfort zone and to try to be better.”

She means it too. To put her convictions to the test, I decide to see if she will commit to a proudest moment, some cynosure in her record-breaking career that she treasures above all others. If she truly doesn’t measure her achievements by material gains, then she won’t talk of specific wins.

I’m not disappointed.

“This is a difficult question!” she concedes, before adding, “I think I’m proud that I never gave up, not a single run. And I hope I will have the strong will to continue in this kind of system.”

The more athletes I talk to, the more that common element comes to the fore: tenacity. You could probably apply the same approach to any kind of vocation, even those with no relation to sport. Thriving entrepreneurs seem to find a way to pick themselves up after every fall. The ability to deal with failure is key. Let the first setback snuff out your ambition and you’re already on the road to mediocrity.

“I never had this problem. Failure is my biggest motivation. When I lose a race I would be happiest if I could ride the same slope again, or train some more to improve myself. And I take this motivation with me to other trainings.”

Ester Ledecká is no quitter, that much is obvious. She is relentless in the pursuit of her passions (most definitively, said passions are plural). But what is easy to overlook is the importance of practicing the metier that you have the most passion for in the first place.

If like me you subscribe to the Ester Ledecká Instagram feed, then you’ll see a lady who never stops. She is either training on skis or snowboard, or if there’s sea nearby then she will be windsurfing or playing beach volleyball. I wonder if that bustling, perpetually active lifestyle is one she would prescribe to others.

“I don’t know. I love to move and I love sports, that is the reason why I do it. I don’t think about it in the way that I have to do it, I just want to do it! I think everybody should do the things they love. And to live their lives the way they want, to make their own footsteps – maybe even at the places where no one was in front of them.”

I’ve learned a lot from Ester Ledecká, and actually a lot of it is transferable to this leisure-skier/boarder – and to this writer. I’ve learned from her even if she is still learning herself. As she continues to tread uncharted ground.

I can’t wait to see what’s next.

My thanks to the inspirational and groundbreaking Ester Ledecká for her time. Thanks also to Sigi Grabner of SG Snowboards for his assistance in arranging this interview.

You can keep up with Ester as she advances on yet more new territory at the following feeds:

Ester Ledecká Instagram: @esterledecka

Ester Ledecká Twitter: @ledeckaester

Ester Ledecká Facebook: /esterledecka.cz