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.
At this point in my career, I have the privilege of choosing my partners. In the beginning, you more or less take what comes in the door – or what matches up with your brand.
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 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.
Some of them I probably would like. Some of my fans probably beat their wives or run over little kids and they just happen to watch me on TV and like the way I ski.
I would just fly off jumps and go 40 or 50 meters when I was 6 years old – break skis, smash my goggles and get a bloody nose and go crawl inside for a little while and then come back out and ski more in the afternoon.
When I was little, I spent a lot of time by myself. When other kids were in school, I was skiing and thinking about things. I was alone on the mountain.
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.
