Three-time Olympic champion Ester Ledecká appears in the anti-doping system as both a skier and a snowboarder, so she can have twice as many checks. At today’s press conference, she told how she got drunk on water during one of them after winning the snowboarding world title in 2015.
Ledecká has two registration numbers in the system of the International Skiing and Snowboarding Federation (FIS), which is also reflected in doping controls. “Because I’m guided as a skier and as a snowboarder, they don’t communicate with each other, and it can happen that I get both checks at the same time. They won’t tell each other that I’m the same person. It happened to me, for example, that we had check twice in a row in one week,” she said.
She had an unforgettable experience from the inspection after her first world title, which she won as a nineteen-year-old in Lachtal, Austria. In January 2015, she won the parallel slalom at the snowboarding championship, and a day later she had to compete in the giant slalom. She knew that she should undergo regeneration, including cycling and working with a physiotherapist, so she tried to speed up the check-up.
“I drank about four liters of water on my ex. I peed just fine, but then I started to get really dizzy. I learned that you can get drunk like that, that you normally get water poisoning and that it’s the same as if you they poisoned me with alcohol. So I can’t compare it because I’ve never been drunk with alcohol,” she recounted.
Anyway, there wasn’t much from the regeneration back then. “We were messing around so much that I couldn’t even ride the exercise bike, because I couldn’t even climb on it,” Ledecká recalled. In this state, she headed to dinner where everyone congratulated her on her title. She had to hold on to things to keep from falling. “The coach came to me to ask if I was drunk or what was going on, that I started celebrating early, that I had to race the next day. I tried to explain to him that it happened to me because I got drunk from the water,” Ledecká added.
