By JOSEPH WILSON
A young Ester Ledecka had heard it all before, that a real champion commits body and soul to a single sport.
She wasn’t having it. And instead of following conventional wisdom she rewrote what was possible by winning the super-G on skis and the parallel giant slalom on snowboard at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
That made the Czech winter sports whiz the first athlete to win two gold medals in two different sports at the same Winter Olympics. Four years later, she won another gold medal in snowboard in Beijing, where she just missed the podium on skis with a fifth-place finish in super-G.
Despite a scheduling conflict that makes it impossible for her to compete in women’s downhill skiing she can make some more Olympic history at the Milan Cortina Games when she goes for another double in snowboarding parallel GS and super-G on skis.
Another milestone in her grasp
No snowboarder, not even the great Shaun White, has won the same event at three consecutive Olympics.
Ledecka, now 30, will shoot for that feat in the Italian Alps. Her final is scheduled for Feb. 8, four days before the women’s halfpipe final, where Chloe Kim will attempt three in a row as well.
Ledecka is in fine form after winning a recent World Cup in snowboard PGS in Austria, her only snowboard warmup for the Olympics this year.
“I wanted to compete in at least one (snowboard) race because the rhythm of the whole day differs from when I ski,
” she told Czech media. “One is in a completely different setting so I’m glad I tried it after a long time and we’ll see how we decide on the next races.”
Ledecka finished 10th in a World Cup super-G at Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on Saturday as a warmup on skis before heading to the Olympics.
No downhill for Ledecka
Ledecka has been forced to set aside the downhill at the Olympics. The schedule has the final of snowboarding’s PGS set for 1 p.m. in Livigno on Feb. 8. The women’s downhill is set to take place in Cortina at 11:30 a.m. the same day. It’s about a 4-hour drive between the two venues.
Ledecka lodged an unsuccessful appeal to the International Olympic Committee to change the event timings.
She picked snowboarding but not before shedding some tears of frustration.
“I cried a bit a few times about it but we did the best we could,” Ledecka said in October when she announced her decision to drop downhill at the Games. “I’m the only athlete who has qualified for the event in two sports for the third time so I was hoping that they would take that into account.”
Ledecka will be able to get over to Cortina for the women’s super-G on Feb. 12.
How she made history in South Korea
Ledecka was as stunned as anyone when she pulled off one of the biggest surprises in Olympic history in South Korea.
Defending super-G gold medalist Anna Veith was at the bottom of the slope and being congratulated by other competitors when the unheralded Ledecka, then 22, hurled herself down the super-G course.
Ledecka famously said “Is this a kind of mistake?” upon seeing her name pop up atop the timing chart, 0.01 seconds faster than Veith.
There was no error and Ledecka followed that shocking victory days later by winning another gold on her snowboard.
One blade or two, it’s all about speed
Ledecka’s first sport was ice hockey, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Jan Klapac, who won two Olympic medals in hockey for Czechoslovakia in 1964 and 1968.
She started skiing at age 4 before switching to freestyle snowboarding and eventually alpine snowboarding and then back to alpine. She insists that skiing and snowboarding, even at the highest levels, are complementary.
As she told Olympics.com, she was stubbornly loyal to her vision of becoming an elite performer in two sports: “Since I was 14, my coaches have told me, ‘You must make a choice and blah, blah, blah.’ I’d say to them, ’I will do them both, and if that bothers you, I will find another coach because this is how it is going to be.’”
AP writer Karel Janicek in Prague contributed.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
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