Matthias Mayer no longer has to prove anything to anyone. The 31-year-old from Carinthia already has two Olympic gold medals – 2014 in the downhill from Sochi and 2018 in the Super-G from Pyeongchang – in his pocket that night Sunday (4 a.m., ORF 1) he prepares to expand his collection on “The Rock” in Yanqing. Provided that the unpredictable wind, which whirled the second downhill training session back by an hour yesterday, doesn’t play tricks on the alpine aces.
“I can easily go for it under quotation marks, but if I’m already here, then I want a medal,” said the veteran, who would write skiing history if he were successful. There is still no double Olympic downhill champion and with Kjetil Andre Aamodt only one racer who has conquered three speed titles under the sign of the five rings. The Norwegian triumphed in the Super-G in 1992, 2002 and 2006.
On record hunt
Should Mayer win tomorrow, he would catch up with Austria’s record holders, the three-time Olympic champions Felix Gottwald (Nordic combined), Thomas Morgenstern (ski jumping) and Toni Sailer (alpine skiing).
It is logical that questions about possible records are booming. Mayer is a laid-back guy and answers politely, but he doesn’t seem to have much fun with the longing for superlatives. “The expectations of me are correspondingly higher because of my success. Yes, I have experience, but I’m definitely not the only one at the start who is already an Olympic medalist,” he said to the OÖN.
The Norwegian Kjetil Jansrud won gold, silver and two bronzes in 2014 and 2018, the Swiss Beat Feuz silver and bronze in 2018, and the South Tyrolean Christof Innerhofer silver in 2014.
At that time, eight years ago in Russia, Mayer was ten kilos lighter, still without a World Cup victory (now he has eleven), relatively unexperienced and even after the golden descent not calm in person. A week later, the Super-G was on the agenda. “The race overwhelmed me immensely. All of a sudden I was so nervous at the start that I almost slipped when diving,” the champion remembers his retirement.
What he wants to imply is clear: Even if you have won so much, you can’t buy anything from the glorious past on “Day X”. Despite this, Mayer believes in his qualities. “I would say that the track here in Yanqing suits me.”
Not only the service people are challenged at temperatures of minus 23.7 degrees Celsius. This value was measured yesterday at the start of the descent at an altitude of 2179 meters. “It’s extremely cold. In the morning when I drove in, I noticed that I was getting frostbite on my nose,” reports Mayer. On Sunday, when the work is done, his heart should warm up.
Source: Nachrichten
