“I find madness”
Ski Olympic champion maneuvers through millions
05/10/2022 07:31 am
Katja Weber, née Seizinger, is not afraid of big numbers. As the head of the supervisory board of two steel companies, she is used to sums in the millions. There’s the 50, which as of today stands for your age, a no brainer. The three-time Olympic champion still goes skiing, but she avoids the public.
Markus Wasmeier rubs his eyes in amazement. “Katja won’t turn 50 after all,” says the double Olympic champion about Katja Weber, née Seizinger, and laughs: “She’s at least: younger!” But it’s true: the three-time Olympic champion, with Maria Höfl-Riesch the most successful German ski racer, is celebrating a milestone birthday today, Tuesday.
Seizinger celebrated her first Olympic victory in 1994 in the downhill.
(Photo: imago images / WEREK)
“I think it’s amazing,” says Wasmeier, Weber was “mad as an athlete”. As the head of the supervisory board of two steel companies with balance sheet totals in the three-digit million range, she is now “one step higher”.
Seizinger was a top star on the slopes – but not one you could touch. Wasmeier appreciates her as a “very dear girl” and “loyal soul” who can be really funny. The public, from which she withdrew almost completely after the end of her career in 1999, got to know her as rather sober. “Doing the fairy on the wheel of fortune,” she once said, “is not my thing.”
Gold medals in the attic
It is fitting that the two-time overall World Cup winner keeps her many trophies at home in Eberbach near Heidelberg “almost all of them in the basement”, “and I have to look for the key first”. Her medals – Weber was the only athlete to win Olympic downhill gold twice – are in the attic.
Only a hand-painted vase, which she received for the last of her 36 World Cup victories (German record) in Are in 1998, made it into the living room. When their children Finn and Ylva turned it into a playroom, the good piece was always put away.
The three-time “Sportswoman of the Year” said goodbye to the ski circus, but she still meets up with her old colleagues for “legendary” excursions, as Wasmeier reports. “It gets really tiring,” he says with a smile, she always takes the first gondola and finishes with the last. “When I do something, I do it right,” Katja Weber once said – whether as a skier or steel manager.