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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the really important things about the Olympics is, to enjoy yourself, you have to accept that it’s different and feed off the enthusiasm of everyone and the inspiration and hopefully that will elevate your performance.
