My grandfather was very into horse racing, and I found some of his old journals and got into it from there. It has a lot of parallels to skiing. It’s a fun lifestyle, being around the racetrack.
In some ways, that’s the story of my season – when I wasn’t making big mistakes, I was winning races and being on the podium. And when I made mistakes I was still fourth or fifth, just off the podium.
Obviously, you always want to win, but you want to win by skiing a race that you’re proud of and you feel like you really challenged yourself and left it all out there.
People want athletes to cater to their image of what an athlete should be, but they also want them to fail so they can feel like their screwups are all right.
My team has been very unreceptive about the fact that I consistently show them that I train slightly differently than they do, that I consistently show them that I am in better shape for ski racing than anyone else on the team.
