Marco Odermatt is overall World Cup winner

The sentence is a good three years old and has often been recycled: “He can be the overall World Cup winner, Olympic champion – and whatever he wants,” said Marcel Hirscher about Marco Odermatt.

And a few months later, Odermatt said about Hirscher and the sentence: “If a 16-year-old wins against Roger Federer, I would also say that in three years he will win big tournaments.”

The three years have passed and the prophecy of perhaps the greatest ski racer in history has largely been fulfilled. On February 13, Marco Odermatt became Olympic champion in giant slalom, like Marcel Hirscher four years earlier. And now, on March 13, Odermatt secured the overall World Cup victory with a third place in the second giant slalom in Kranjska Gora. Before the final four races in Méribel and Courchevel, the 24-year-old from Nidwalden has a 329-point lead over second-placed Aleksander Kilde. Because neither of them drive slaloms, the decision has already been made.

When skiing plays fate

Olympic champion and overall World Cup winner Marco Odermatt – it’s logo. This talent. These omens – junior world champions in four disciplines, giant slalom, super-G, downhill and combination. But it is precisely in alpine skiing that fate plays with its most promising talents. For example Daniel Albert: Junior world champions in three disciplines, giant slalom, downhill and combination, the most garish predictions that shattered in a horrible fall in Kitzbühel. No Olympic victory. No overall World Cup victory. Glad to have a normal life.

Nothing is logo.

The Ski World Cup is now 55 years old, but only seven Swiss women and five Swiss women have won the overall ranking, the list of names reads like a who’s who of the skiing nation: Lise-Marie Morerod, Marie-Theres Nadig, Erika Hess, Michela Figini, Maria Walliser, Vreni Schneider and Lara Gut, Peter Lüscher, Pirmin Zurbriggen, Paul Accola, Carlo Janka – and Marco Odermatt.

When a Swiss man last won the big crystal ball twelve years ago, the NZZ wrote: “It is uncertain whether (Carlo) Janka will become a multi-successful evergreen like (Hermann) Maier or (Lasse) Kjus. The abilities look promising, habitus and environment currently too. But one big unknown remains. Janka is the fourth young Swiss man who has been predicted to have an outstanding career since the turn of the millennium. The hopefuls in front of him were Silvano Beltrametti, Daniel Albrecht and Marc Berthod. Beltrametti has been paralyzed from the waist down since a fall, Albrecht and Berthod’s careers have faltered after they had only just begun. Even an overall World Cup winner is not immune to bad luck with injuries.”

The longing of ski enthusiasts for a new Pirmin Zurbriggen, for a second Swiss all-rounder that has shaped the World Cup for more than one season, remained unsatisfied. The former head coach Martin Rufener once said about Carlo Janka that out of a hundred thousand people only ten are mentally as strong as he is. Within a year, Janka became world champion, Olympic champion and overall World Cup winner, three titles that only one other Swiss can claim: Zurbriggen. But when Janka said goodbye in Wengen two months ago, people not only remembered this record of success, but also the damage balance of the constant physical problems that plagued him after the miracle winter.

Before Janka left, he explained to Odermatt the Brüggli-S, a notorious key point in Wengen, it looked like a symbol for a change of staff. Odermatt finished first, second and fourth in his first three Lauberhorn races. This talent. Odermatt has once again improved significantly this season.

A year ago he was narrowly beaten in a duel for the overall World Cup by Frenchman Alexis Pinturault. At first, Odermatt found this outcome disappointing, but dealing with such setbacks is one of his primary strengths. In the 2021 World Cup giant slalom, Odermatt was eliminated as one of the favorites in the first run, “that’s definitely the biggest disappointment of my career,” he said, who therefore had to leave Cortina d’Ampezzo without a medal. Odermatt reacted with a World Cup final furioso that almost earned him the big crystal ball.

This winter, Odermatt excelled in two extreme situations. In Adelboden, on the chairlift to the start, tears welled up in his eyes. As a boy, Odermatt had not dreamed of medals or crystal balls, but of taking part in the giant slalom on the Kuonisbergli and of the red start number of the leader in the discipline ranking. Now he was here again, like the year before with the red start number, but this time in front of thousands instead of no spectators and as a top favorite instead of a co-favourite. Odermatt became aware of the pressure of expectation in an intensity like never before. But he held out and won.

And then the Winter Games in China, medal contenders in three races, first chance wasted, second chance wasted, and again Odermatt only had the giant slalom left. Gold, like Carlo Janka twelve years earlier.

Zurbriggen: “Full down in the holes”

Odermatt understands the art of making the difficult look easy and the high risk safe. Before last year’s World Championships, Pirmin Zurbriggen said in one Interview with “NZZ am Sonntag”: “I saw Marco Odermatt as a little boy. He could drive so hard that you got scared watching it. Full down in the holes – you ask yourself: How is this possible?! Something has to happen in your head that is stronger than anything else.”

Bravado is a core virtue in this sport. The relationship between successful and unsuccessful attacks separates the winning drivers from the top drivers. When Odermatt took third place after the first run in Alta Badia in December 2018 and the first World Cup podium was within reach, he drove aggressively as usual in the second run – and retired.

“I didn’t just want to do a run ‘abärösälä’ and finish seventh, eighth or something like that,” said Odermatt a few days later. He hadn’t taken any anger from Alta Badia about a missed opportunity, but the realization that he could already challenge the very best. In March it worked twice with the podium.

In the meantime, Odermatt has already won ten World Cup races, the same number as Bernhard Russi, one less than Carlo Janka, six this season alone. Sometimes in the circle of grown-ups he still seems like the ski fan he was as a boy, when he kept his own lists of statistics, when he secured the main prize several times in Silvano Beltrametti’s youth race: a day’s skiing with Didier Cuche, his idol.

Now he’s an idol himself, for whom a sixth grader from Richterswil wrote a song and produced a video clip, “Odi, Odi, Odi, Odermatt”, based on the melody of Andreas Gabalier’s “Hulapalu”. Odermatt sent the teacher a fifty note for a mid-morning snack.

It’s anecdotes like this that solidify the impression that Odermatt is reaching popularity ratings like he’s driving in the glorious 1980s. He seems made for the role of the favorite of the ski nation: rustic dialect, real sportsman, mischievous mischievousness, likes a jass instead of a mobile game or a beer instead of a protein shake. Odermatt uses skis from the small Swiss manufacturer Stöckli instead of those from a large foreign manufacturer. He (still) lives in a flat-sharing community and only pays a few hundred francs a month in rent. When they happened to meet him at the mountain bike world cup races in Lenzerheide last September and asked whether a sponsor had invited him, Odermatt said: No, he was here with colleagues.

One like that goes down well in this country, one like that can be excellently marketed. In addition to the personal main sponsor, no fewer than nineteen “premium partners” are listed on Odermatt’s website, from Longines to Kärcher. His successes and his charisma have made him a young millionaire.

Expected by the whole ski world

Marco Odermatt is the 26th rider to win the overall World Cup, half of them have done it multiple times, the other half once. Not only Marcel Hirscher expected this success from Odermatt, but the whole ski world. Peter Lüscher, Paul Accola and Carlo Janka won the overall World Cup after other names had been hotly traded at the beginning of the season. Like Zurbriggen, Odermatt won him as the man on whom all eyes were directed from the start.

“It’s the greatest thing in our sport,” Odermatt said in an NZZ interview at the beginning of 2021 about the overall World Cup. “And if everyone is talking about it and I theoretically have the opportunity to do so, it’s definitely a goal.” Now the theory has become a fact.

What next? Multiple successful evergreen like Pirmin Zurbriggen? It also applies to Odermatt that one second can undo years of work. Where would he be now if he had gotten off less lightly in Alta Badia in 2019 than with a meniscus tear, such as a cruciate ligament tear?

But who else should one trust to walk in the footsteps of the greatest Swiss ski racer if not Odermatt? Pirmin Zurbriggen achieved 40 race and 4 overall victories in the World Cup. Marcel Hirscher? 67 race and 8 overall victories in a row. But every path is different. Hirscher focused on two disciplines, slalom and giant slalom. Before the winter, which was to be his last, he said on the subject of resignation: “The demotivation at the end of a season is so great that I have to ask the question every time. The exhaustion is there, the relief of having achieved something is huge – but also the danger of losing something.”

Marco Odermatt has come this far without Hirscher’s drive, to the sunniest place in his sport. Everyone talked about it. He did it.