In mid-January, the downhill Olympic champion will compete in his last World Cup race in Kitzbühel. The Emmentaler Feuz might have been talented enough to win the overall World Cup – and he won as much as he could.
Perhaps his last great moment as a ski racer: Beat Feuz on February 7, 2022 at the Olympic Games in Beijing with the downhill gold medal.
The last NZZ interview with Beat Feuz ended the way this text begins. Feuz said he had “actually already agreed” with his older daughter Clea when he would retire as a top athlete. Clea, born in 2018, had said he should go skiing for “four more years”; Feuz replied that it was “a long time ago”. The exact date remained open, but it was assumed that it would still be two or three years before Feuz stopped.
And now suddenly it should be over. The date is no longer open, Feuz wants to end his career on January 21, 2023 with the Hahnenkamm downhill from Kitzbühel. It’s a surprising resignation that’s a little less surprising when you consider how Feuz came to this decision. “Pushing your limits and taking risks have been my passion in ski racing for years,” says Feuz, 35, in the communiqué on Wednesday afternoon. «My feeling was often the key to success. But now my feeling tells me that the physical limits have been reached. »
He’s listening to the feeling again after a start to the season that was surprisingly leisurely by his standards. In the four previous downhill runs of the winter he finished 5th, 9th, 9th and 18th. Every result was explainable, but: If Feuz didn’t retire, he had never been classified outside the top 15 in a downhill run since the 2015/16 season – until he finished 18th in Val Gardena last weekend. From the end of November 2017 to the end of December 2021, Feuz even managed to finish 36 consecutive World Cup runs in the top ten.
Results also determine an emotional life. But with Feuz it’s a bit more complex. When it came to feeling, it was always about his left knee in his later years.
Feuz learned to ski on the ski lift that his grandfather had built
But let’s start with the earlier years, when Feuz made the name for himself as a skier who doesn’t need many days of training before he feels what skis and snow want again. It was like that from day one, since the beginning of his skiing career, which started in Schangnau in the Emmental, on a ski lift that his grandfather had built on a farm that his parents did not expand in order to finance their son’s career. “He knows exactly where to go and how. It doesn’t matter whether the snow is frozen or a little softer, Beat drives just fine,” said companions eleven years ago during a visit to Schangnau. Or: “Everyone else practices for years – but he just stood on the board and drove down the slope.”
Back then, around the turn of the year 2011/12, Feuz was fighting to win the overall World Cup, ultimately missing out on first place by 25 points, behind the eventual series winner Marcel Hirscher. But: Feuz drove the last races of the season with a damaged left knee. Years earlier he had torn his cruciate ligament for the first time, knee problems and dealing with them remained constant companions. Unforgotten how he explained in the overall World Cup final sprint in March 2012 why he had started a race despite complaints: “But when I warmed up, it went so well that I dared to do it. The injury can’t get worse.”
A good six months later, after an infection, the knee was in such bad condition that Feuz’s career was in jeopardy. Another episode from Feuz’s many years in ski racing: a press conference in Bern’s Inselspital, December 6, 2012. On the journalists’ seats were Samichlaus bags, Feuz was 25 years old, it is said to have been 200,000 francs Parents had been invested in this life as a skier – and now a doctor said he was assuming that the knee would recover sufficiently for Feuz to be able to cope with everyday life untroubled. But skiing at World Cup level? “The unclear inflammatory situation is not optimal for the milieu in this knee.”
The knee had to be rinsed five times under general anesthesia, and the event at the Inselspital was also about whether mistakes were made in Feuz’s treatment. The driver himself said that a few people were “perhaps a little overwhelmed”. In a decade and a half of ski racing, Feuz didn’t make a name for himself as a loudmouth, but when he had to, he said what he thought, big and small, seriously and also with humor.
Another episode: an interview before the Lauberhorn races in 2019. Feuz was asked how much he actually still likes to ski – whether skis are primarily tools for him. Feuz’ answer: «Yes, definitely. When I say that I have three days of skiing a year that have nothing to do with my job, that’s almost an exaggeration.” Question: Why not more often? Answer: «Do you like to write essays in your free time? Writing is your job, skiing is mine, and when I’m free I leave that aside.”
Yes, Feuz knew and felt how many training days he needed. And also: what and who he needed to be fast again quickly. For the return to skiing at World Cup level, Feuz worked with fewer and fewer people, only with those he trusted who he did not think were overwhelmed – and so he managed something sportingly miraculous: ten years after the press conference in the Inselspital he has 16 World Cup victories; he secured the small crystal globe for the best downhill of the season four times, from 2018 to 2021; he won World Championship gold, 2017, and even Olympic gold, 2022.
He was credited with so much early on because he was considered a genius on skis; he was soon no longer believed capable of that much, because he also had the reputation of being a sloppy genius. But he was relaxed about it, sometimes cultivating this image. He used to do the downhill training in Zermatt in slalom pants until the perfectionist veteran Didier Cuche went to him and said that it didn’t make any sense, “we don’t have a comparison”. So the next day Feuz put on his downhill clothes and was half a second faster than Cuche.
The last victory run on the Lauberhorn: Beat Feuz, winner of the downhill in Wengen in 2012, 2018 and 2020.
The comparisons with Cuche invited Feuz to be consistently portrayed as a minimalist. It was forgotten how much Feuz had done to save his career despite many injuries. The day after the 2017 World Cup title, Feuz was sitting in a hotel in St. Moritz and said: “You can never turn off critics if someone says I don’t have enough strength or condition. . . I’m world champion, I won the longest World Cup downhill run in Wengen and the main Olympic rehearsal in Sochi with a skiing time of 2 minutes and 15 minutes. I guess I don’t have to prove anything anymore.” And he confirmed: Everything that comes is an encore – basically it has been like this since the knee infection in 2012.
What connects Feuz with Albrecht, Berthod, Viletta and Janka
From this point of view, on January 21, 2023, what is perhaps the longest addition to ski racing will come to an end. On December 26th in Bormio, Feuz will talk in detail about the motives, his feelings and his limits. And it will be very much about the left knee, at least in the questions. The knee is not mentioned in the resignation communiqué, and Feuz has never wanted to pay too much attention to it in talks in recent years. Everyone knew that it only allowed a limited resilience, but Feuz never wanted to use it as an excuse.
In spring 2021 he took a longer break because of his knee, in spring 2022 he handled it the same way, he “really didn’t do anything”, as he later said. In the descent from Val Gardena in 2021, he “got another one”, as he once described it; from then until the end of last season it was something of a constant little fight with the knee against the knee; a cooperation and competition that still led to Olympic gold.
Feuz might have been talented enough to win the overall World Cup – and he’s won as much as he can. And so the last Swiss ski racer says goodbye, who comes from a generation that was considered golden and has become the Drama Generation. Daniel Albrecht, Marc Berthod (both born in 1983), Carlo Janka, Sandro Viletta (1986) and Feuz (1987) promised a lot and kept more than enough, they all won races and medals – and yet people like to say it would be much more been possible because they all struggled again and again with injuries or complaints.
As Janka once said: The body forgives “a lot for a long time, and at some point it says: ‘Not like that.'”. But: “Ultimately, he also carried me to a lot. I’m happy with the job he did.”
Feuz would probably put it differently: the body did a job. And he did it well. For Feuz, days on the skis soon had nothing to do with his job. And he will find out whether he also likes to ski in his free time.