When Sofia Goggia is out and about on the piste, the looks of the supervisors at the finish and the trainer along the route are always a little worried. Because the ski racer from Bergamo is almost always the fastest when she arrives at the bottom without an accident. But she doesn’t always do that. Things have already gone well twice at the World Ski Championships in Courchevel. She finished the Super-G of the combination safely and without incident. The first downhill training too – with the best time.
Alone, this season the breakdown races are balanced with those competitions in which everything went smoothly. In St. Moritz she crashed into a gate post so vehemently that she broke her hand. In St. Anton she flew spectacularly off the runway and suffered skin abrasions. A week later, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, she fell again, this time injuring her right leg and skipping the next day’s race as a result. However, the injury would not have stopped her, rather the fact that Sofia Goggia finally wanted to travel to a major event in reasonably fit condition again. “My goal for the season is the World Cup,” she said. She has never been world champion.
No, Sofia Goggia is not self-pitying. And to say she celebrates her injuries like Lindsey Vonn did isn’t entirely fair either. The American had inflated the smallest wounds with the intention of knitting the American heroic epic and was therefore only called “drama queen” at the end of her career.
“merciless uncompromising”
Goggia also has drama, but in a different way. She holds her swollen hand up to the camera after crossing the finish line with the best time again and says it’s just a hand. She bites her teeth, like in Beijing or most recently in St. Moritz. She had her broken hand operated on that evening in order to be back at the start the next day – and to win the downhill. For Goggia, falls and injuries are as much a part of her career as victories and medals.
She is the best in the downhill, without a doubt, and she is also one of the medal candidates in the Super-G this Wednesday. This “merciless uncompromising attitude is impressive,” says Kira Weidle. The German downhill skier thinks the Italian is a role model in this respect. “That’s what makes her special, because she certainly doesn’t ski any better.” But Weidle also knows that the Italian “always plays with fire”, a game of risk that the 30-year-old Olympic champion Called “Goggia style” in 2018.
Goggia loves the unusual
Goggia knows, said Italian women’s head coach Gianluca Rulfi, that she needs to get continuity. “And that means not risking 105 percent in every race. Because 90 percent is often enough.” She just can’t implement it. For her, skiing is “an expression of character,” Goggia once told the “Neue Züricher Zeitung”. And “it’s never quiet inside me”.
This athlete is difficult to catch and get on course. “Sometimes she prefers to do something different,” said Rulfi when Goggia traveled to Dubai for a few days just before the World Cup to clear her head, she revealed. According to “Gazzetta dello Sport”, the trip had been planned for a long time, but became explosive due to her fall in Cortina and the cancellation of the race a day later. Coach Rulfi didn’t think this “excursion into the warmth” was necessary, “but if she really wants to do it…”
Extravagance and a few extra tours are one thing, the other is that it is important to her to move in a team, to train with colleagues. That’s why she criticized Federica Brignone when she split from the team with brother Davide before last season. “It has divided our group and where there is division there can be no strength,” Goggia said at the time. But the conflict only escalated when Brignone’s mother, former slalom runner Maria Rosa Quario, publicly attacked Goggia and exaggerated the argument.
After the internal clarification, Quario gave up her position as an expert at Sky or maybe had to give up. She only attends the races as a spectator. Brignone also returned to the team. It didn’t hurt her, she became combined world champion on Monday. Goggia starts her gold mission on Saturday in the downhill. You just have to get to the finish without an accident.
