What is Simon Ammann doing now?
The cryptic sentences from Kultspringer
February 15, 2022, 6:10 p.m
Simon Ammann has given his sport, ski jumping, so many wonderful moments. But the 40-year-old is now a long way from being world class. But he doesn’t let the fun of joy be taken away – and his ability flashes from time to time. But what’s next?
When his now 24-year-long Olympic madness trip had to come to an end once again, and this time definitely for good, Simon Ammann didn’t want to utter the bad word with a “K” at the beginning and “arring” at the end. “I never like to talk about the last jump. It’s important what happens before a jump, not afterwards,” said the Swiss ski jumping icon late on Monday evening: “Because before that it is decided whether a jump will be successful.”
In the team competition in Beijing, the 40-year-old jumped quite well, with Switzerland coming eighth. “I just wanted to show my class again,” he said. As if the so popular and esteemed grand seigneur needed a proof of his class. In 1998, Ammann’s Olympic adventure, the ski-jumping Harry Potter adventure, had begun just as the first volume of books on JK Rowling’s up-and-coming magicians had just come out. At the age of 16, Ammann started in Nagano, Japan, a farm boy from Toggenburg who had never been on an airplane before, on a trip around the world.
And the little guy with the contagious smile turned this world upside down: in 2002 and 2010 Ammann won both Olympic individual competitions, not even the legendary Matti Nykänen won four individual golds. Ammann could have retired long ago and enjoyed a relaxed life with his wife Yana and their three children.
And “Simi” had already said goodbye to the Olympics twice. In Sochi in 2014, when he announced at an emotional press conference that “99 percent of the time he would no longer be in Pyeongchang”. And when he is said to have promised his wife there before the 2018 games that it would really be over afterwards. Since then, however, he has consistently removed the subject of resignation from the to-do list. “I’m not even thinking about the macro, the big one,” Ammann recently told the sports information service. Cortina 2026, is that really out of the question? “Never say never,” he said on Monday.