Ester Ledecka targets snowboard success after historic skiing gold

Amid the many spectacular performances at these Winter Olympics no athlete has caused more jaws to drop than Ester Ledecka, a 22-year-old sporting polymath from the Czech Republic.

Last Saturday Ledecka made history when she jumped out of the starting gate in the women’s super-G, a feat that made her the first person to have competed in Olympic snowboard and skiing events. Yet she was just getting started.

Because precisely one minute 21.11 seconds later she had secured a gold medal round her neck. It was a stunning performance given she considers herself primarily a snowboarder and had never won a medal in any international skiing event. Even Ledecka was shocked. Afterwards she turned to her mum and said, “How did that happen?”

What made Ladecka’s victory even more extraordinary was that she was crying beforehand due to severe pain. “I thought everything was destroyed,” says her skiing coach, Tomas Bank. “But we somehow solved it. I didn’t expect her to win the Olympics but I knew that she might win something in skiing soon because she is very good.”

Most Czech officials, however, were not watching. Ice hockey is the country’s most popular sport, so they had gone to watch their team play instead. Yet when they heard of Ledecka’s success they turned their jackets inside out to show their coats’ gold-coloured inner linings as a tribute.

Sadly reports that she had used skis borrowed from the American superstar skier Mikaela Shiffrin to win last weekend’s race are based on loose whispers rather than hard fact. As Bank explains to the Guardian, the pair share the same ski manufacturer. So after Shiffrin had tried hundreds of skis and picked out her favourite 30 or so, Ledecka had the next picks. So they were not exactly borrowed – more slightly second hand.

And in the early hours of Saturday morning Ledecka will bid for an astonishing double when she goes for snowboarding gold in the parallel giant slalom.

“I firmly believe she’s one of the greatest living athletes,” says her snowboarding coach, Justin Reiter. “Yes,” Bank agrees. “She really is someone very special.”

At Czech House, the place in Gangdeung where the country’s athletes go to wind down after they have finished competing, one official tells the Guardian that until last weekend Ledecka’s father Janek – a famous folk-pop musician who is renowned for his Christmas songs – was actually more famous than his daughter in South Korea because of a musical version of Hamlet.

Not that Janek minds being overtaken. In fact he might yet write a song about his daughter. “We are not pushy parents,” he says. “It’s the other way. We’re trying to take her away from training. We have to hold her back.”

Ledecka started skiing when she was two and got into snowboarding aged five to keep up with her older brother Jonas. “We were in the mountains half the year and I was in Prague, too, so I was going to two schools,” she told the New York Times in a rare interview last year.

“From the start there were a lot of people who would say, ‘You cannot do both; you need to specialise, otherwise you will never reach a higher level,’” she added. “And I said, ‘No, I want to go in both and, if it matters to you that I do both, then I need to choose another coach because this is the way I will do it.”

For most people doubling up would also dilute their hopes of success. Bank, however, believes that competing in skiing and snowboard helps.

“When it comes to training we have blocks of snowboarding and skiing - three weeks for one and three weeks for the other,” he says. “After we’ve been in Chile, say, for three weeks to ski, when she returns to Europe she wants to be back snowboarding again – and vice versa. It works well.”

Ledecka’s results back that up. A year ago she became the first person to compete in the world championships in both sports, winning a gold medal in the parallel giant slalom and a silver medal in the parallel slalom in snowboarding in Spain, and coming in the top 30 in the downhill, combined and super-G in skiing in Switzerland.

Worryingly for her rivals, she has plenty of time to improve – especially as she is so dedicated. In fact the main worry her coaches have is that she never wants to get off the slope, which in alpine skiing can be dangerous.

“She is absolutely focused,” says Bank. “I don’t normally watch her compete in snowboard. But one of the times I did, she didn’t say hello when she saw me between her runs. She was in the tunnel and it was impossible to see any emotions. But afterwards she was very open and extroverted, like always.”

When she is not racing Ledecka loves beach volleyball and windsurfing – and has contemplated taking the latter up seriously according to her team-mates.

She also enjoys watching British TV – particularly Red Dwarf. “She has seen it 4,000 times,” says Banks, laughing. “She is aways speaking about it during dinner. And she also likes Blackadder and, of course, Top Gear.”

And however the result of her Winter Olympic event, Banks says she will not change. “Absolutely not,” he says. “She might be remarkable but she is also totally level-headed.”