You are only 22 and seem destined to help shape ski racing for many years to come. Braathen is also noticeable off the slopes, McGrath said yes and amen to everything for a long time. Both believe that they would not have made it to the top of the world so quickly without the other.
Lucas Braathen (left) and Atle Lie McGrath conquer the ski world as a congenial duo.
Lucas Braathen and Atle Lie McGrath were both born in April 2000, two days apart. Both have one Norwegian parent and one from elsewhere – Braathen’s mother is Brazilian, McGrath’s father is American. They trained together as boys at the Baerums ski club near the capital Oslo, and they rose to become World Cup winners side by side.
As contrasting as their personalities may be, Braathen and McGrath are thought to be the next Norwegian ski twins set to help shape an era of alpine racing. Like Kjetil André Aamodt and Lasse Kjus, Aksel Svindal and Kjetil Jansrud once did.
At the weekend Braathen and McGrath drive the giant slalom and the slalom in Adelboden. There, on the Kuonisbergli, on January 8, 2021, the most unprecedented and drastic duality in their careers happened. Both crashed spectacularly, McGrath in the first giant slalom run, Braathen in the second. Both suffered their most serious injuries to date, both in their left knees, and the season was over for both. the rehab? If they graduated together, what else?
Lucas Braathen got stuck at the last goal in 2021 and fell on the finish line. When he competed on the Kuonisbergli again a year ago, he swung down in front of the legendary, challenging target slope. Braathen, the supposedly fearless man, got scared, as he admitted agitatedly in the finish area.
Horrific images he couldn’t get out of his head
When the NZZ met him and McGrath for a double interview, Braathen said about his abandonment of the race: “I lied to myself about the peculiarity of being back at the scene of the accident. Then the driver in front of me fell, there was an interruption – and I couldn’t get the pictures from the previous year out of my head. Before the finish slope, I started to lose my technique and stability in my knees, I was exhausted from the great tension.” McGrath sits next to him and says: “It takes almost more courage to stop in such a moment than to continue.”
Can the giant slalom on Saturday even become a normal race for Braathen after this history? “I don’t know,” he says, “I didn’t know last year either.” Braathen is now one of the favorites in every giant slalom and slalom; this season he has already won the slalom in Val-d’Isère and one giant slalom in Alta Badia. He’s once again ahead of his friend McGrath, who has yet to make a podium and has never scored in three slaloms.
Braathen has the reputation of being a bird of paradise. The painted fingernails and the unusual style of clothing are enough to attract attention as an oddball in the conservative ski racing milieu. Braathen has to break out regularly, leave the small world of his sport and immerse himself in the big world, preferably in metropolises, he was in Paris at the turn of the year. He also looks for a kick away from the ski slopes, with cliff jumping, skating and surfing. And to compensate for so much physical exercise, he dabbles in fashion.
“Fashion is subjective, nothing you can be the best at,” says Braathen. “Fashion is my outlet because I can express myself freely without being focused on any progress.” He likes it when other people feel challenged by his appearance, but it took him time to dare to show himself as he is. “You have to be prepared for discussions and disputes because this difference is interpreted as unprofessional and dubious,” says Braathen.
For an individualist like him, it is demanding to move in a team structure, especially since the team spirit in the Norwegian Alpine skiers is celebrated almost like a cult, with the solitaire Henrik Kristoffersen being the exception to the rule. The culture of the association is shaped by a kind of social egalitarianism.
A good three years ago, Kjetil Jansrud, the 2014 Super-G Olympic champion and 2019 downhill world champion, said in an NZZ interview: “We are so close to each other that the boys don’t look up to us. That may be before they come into the team. But then they become part of a family. The hierarchy is very flat.” Braathen and McGrath were new to the World Cup at the time. McGrath still remembers his first training session with the team at the Olympiatoppen base: “I didn’t feel like I was entitled to a spot there, but then Kjetil Jansrud took me aside and said: ‘If you’re on this team it doesn’t matter if you’ve celebrated five Olympic victories or never competed in a World Cup race. Everyone has a voice, everyone is heard.’ A childhood idol made me understand that there is a genuine desire on this team to make each other better.”
His father was a ski vagabond
Braathen never needed encouragement to speak up. He had also been on non-conformist paths early on, guided by his father, a farmer’s son who had run away and led a life as a “ski bum”, i.e. vagrant from ski area to ski area. “He taught me to ski without any ulterior motives for a professional career,” says Braathen. “He just wanted me to be able to do that because it’s his greatest joy in life.”
Braathen and McGrath met at the Baerums ski club, where Felix McGrath, Atle’s father, worked as a coach. He represented the USA at the 1988 Winter Olympics and finished second in a World Cup slalom in Åre that same year. He met his wife, a Norwegian cross-country skier, at the University of Vermont. Atle was born in the USA, when he was two and a half the family moved to Norway.
McGrath also took up cross-country skiing in his youth, encouraged by his mother, but his father and ski racing were more appealing. «My father would buy me a giant cinnamon roll after every day of skiing. My mother only rewarded me with a bit of chocolate.” When the sport got more serious, McGrath and Braathen went to a ski school, they were classmates until Braathen changed schools.
Braathen actually wanted to be a footballer. He saw the pompous Nike commercials on YouTube, in which football stars are staged as superheroes. “I wanted to be a guy with an individual football boot design.” Braathen became a ski racer, not a footballer, an individual athlete, not a team athlete. Anyone who thinks that an individual sport suits someone like him better may not know that the vast majority of ski racers spend just as much time in a team circle.
“For a long time I didn’t feel like part of a system,” says Braathen. «I never listened to anyone; if something didn’t suit me and my father, we went our own way. When I got on the World Cup team, I was afraid of being patronized and patronized because I was young and hadn’t achieved anything.”
McGrath learned from Braathen to let go
Braathen says the Norwegian team culture still challenges him to this day. “I sometimes struggle to adapt to the needs of ten others. But overall it works very well. I see the benefits I have as a team player, I take as much as I give.” The Norwegian technical team consists of twelve supervisors and eight athletes, from father of three Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen, 35, to slalom world champion Sebastian Foss-Solevaag and Alexander Steen Olsen, 21, junior world champion in slalom and giant slalom.
Within this working group, Braathen and McGrath form, if not a pair of ski twins, then at least a congenial duo. Once one had advanced and the other followed suit and vice versa, Braathen has always made progress in recent years. He achieved his first World Cup victory in Sölden in 2020, McGrath his first podium finish two months later in Alta Badia. Last winter, McGrath won two slaloms after Braathen advanced from 29th intermediate to first place in the second race in Wengen.
They agree that without each other they would not have made it to the top so quickly. McGrath has always been an easy-care, system-compliant model Norwegian, just like Svindal, Jansrud or Aleksander Kilde. “If I’m the devil, Atle is the little angel who follows all the rules,” says Braathen, who lets McGrath wake him up in the morning. “I’m very organized, Lucas is more chaotic,” says McGrath. “But I learned from him to let go, not always to be focused.”
Above all, however, Braathen showed him not just to say yes and amen all the time. “If I have the feeling that Atle is not doing enough for our interests, we clash,” says Braathen. “He, in turn, sometimes asks me why I’m making a fuss about something I can’t change anyway.” McGrath says: “We have completely different attitudes and approaches, but the same goals.” It would be his turn to draw again.